The Initial Growth and Support of the Emerging Internet: (1970-1995):

1971: The ARPANET now has 15 sites (23 total hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames and averages about 700,000 packets per day.

Project Gutenberg is started by Michael Hart. Its first text is the US Declaration of Independence.

RFC 172 is released establishing the File Transfer Protocol A momentous event!

1972: BBN's ??? creates the first software (SNGMSG and READMAIL) that allows email to be sent between computers, email quickly becomes the network's most popular application. Your instructor first used email in 1974 (of course he was just 5 years old then ...)

ARPA's name is changed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is established as a separate defense agency under the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Now it can get more funding since it now is an element in the cold war strategy. This is largely accidental but nonetheless has fueled the urban legend that the Internet was built to win the Cold War

??? creates the 1st Telnet specification (RFC #318) entitled: 'Ad hoc Telnet Protocol'. Now you can login to a remote machine!

1973: First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London in England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

ARPANET traffic grows to more than 3 million packets per day.

??? sketches his gateway architecture on back of envelope while sitting in a hotel lobby

??? writes a 13 page description of what will become Ethernet as part of his Harvard PhD thesis. He and David Boggs would later create the first ethernet network (running at 2.944 Mbps) in June 1979 This is a major innovation as it establishes hardware and protocol standards for network traffic.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented their first paper on UNIX Ritchie worked at Bell Labs but somehow the Phone Company didn't understand the message. Major screwup

??? and Bob Kahn publish 'A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking', which established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This is also the first time the term Internet was used.

1975: The ARPANET was transferred by DARPA to the Defense Communications Agency (now the Defense Information Systems Agency) as an operational network.

In RFC 706 - On the Junk Mail Problem ??? notes that the design of most mail systems made it difficult to block junk mail, forsight that would prove to be correct when spam begans to fill user's mail boxes.

1978: ???, Steve Crocker, and Danny Cohen create a plan to separate TCP's routing functions into a separate protocol called the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP/IP is now borne and is the same protocol used today.

1981: RFC #791 which defines Internetwork Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is released. IPv4 is the Internet Addressing scheme of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (for instance bigmoo.uoregon.edu is 128.223.21.200)

IBM releases its IBM PC. Retailing for $4500, more than 65,000 are sold in the first 4 months.

1982: The number of hosts breaks 200.

The first PC LAN is demonstrated at the National Computer Conference by Drew Major, Kyle Powell, and Dale Neibaur. Their software would eventually become Novell's Netware.

1983: The number of hosts breaks 500.

The Internet becomes a commerical reality when the ARPANET is split into Military and Civilian sections.

Berkeley releases Unix 4.2BSD, including TCP/IP.

1984

• The number of Internet hosts breaks 1000.
• William Gibson coins the term 'cyberspace' in the novel 'Neuromancer'.
• The Modified Final Judgement provides consumers with more choices for long distance services by 'breaking up' ATT.
• Richard Stallman starts the GNU Project, and would later start the Free Software Foundation.

1986

• The number of Internet hosts breaks 5000.
• The National Science Foundation (NSF) establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC at Princeton, PSC at Pittsburgh, SDSC at UCSD, NCSA at UIUC, Theory Center at Cornell). The NSFnet is created to connect the sites with a backbone speed of 56Kbps.
• Larry Wall creates the Practical Extraction And Reporting Language, Pearl. (it's name would soon be shortened to simply Perl)
• The Cleveland Freenet comes on-line.

1987

• The number of Internet hosts breaks 10,000.
• NSF signs an agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc.
• Jeff Case, Mark Fedor, Martin Schoffstall, and James Davin show off their Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol (SGMP). Amazingly a major Internet outage occurred during the presentation, showing just how badly the system was needed. Their protocol would later evolve into SNMP.

1998

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)is written by Jarkko Oikarinen.
• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps), it handles more than 75 million packets a day. This is when Astronomers first really started using the Internet to do science
• The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable linking North America and Europe is completed, it can handle 40,000 telephone calls simultaneously.
• Van Jacobson writes traceroute while at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs after a conversation with Steve Deering of Stanford University.
everyone's that's Internet hip claims to personally know Van.
• Bernard Daines creates the first Ethernet switch to add Ethernet support to Northern Telecom carrier-class telephone switches.
• The Internet Worm is released by Robert Morris Jr., affecting about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet. CERT(Computer Emergency Response Team) is later formed by DARPA in response to concerns raised by the Worm.
  
  

Remaining Milestones:

• 1989: The number of Internet hosts breaks 100,000.


First Web Project proposal is distributed by CERN's ???. His proposal was for a 'hypertext system' to aid the sharing of information between teams of researchers in the High Energy Physics community.


• 1990: The ARPANET ceases to exist.
  
  The first World-Wide Web software is created by ??? using the HTTP protocol (still in use today).
  
  
  The number of Internet hosts breaks 600,000.
  
  
  NSF lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET backbone. this adversely effects the use of the Internet for scientific research
  
  
  The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps) as traffic passes 1 trillion bytes and 10 billion packets per month.
  
  
  Linus Torvalds announces Linux version 0.02.
  
  
  
• 1992: The number of Internet hosts breaks 1 million.
  
  
  The term 'Surfing the Net' is coined by Jean Armour Polly.
  
  
  
• 1993: The number of Internet hosts breaks 2 million.
  
  
  The White House and United Nations come on-line.
  
  
  NCSA releases the first version of 'Mosaic for X'. This is when the World Wide Web is born and first used
  
  
  There are about 50 HTTP servers in the world. This server was launched about 6 months later as the world's first scientific outreach server
  
  
  DARPA is redesignated as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in President Clinton's strategy paper, 'Technology for America's Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength'.
  
  
  Peter Steiner's famous 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' cartoon appears on page 61 of The New Yorker (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20)
  
  
  There are over 500 known HTTP servers.
  
  
  ??? leaves the NCSA to work for a small software company. He soon forms a partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark that will become Netscape Communications Corp.
  
  
  
• 1995: Netscape 1.0 is realesed in September. Now all dogs can be on the internet and shop.
  
  
  The number of internet hosts breaks 10 million