A Brief History of the INTERNET
UNDER CONSTRUCTION visitor #000123456
From a Cold-War packet network with four nodes to a planet-scale fabric of seven billion devices in roughly fifty years. Click the buttons below to journey through TIME!
UNDER CONSTRUCTION visitor #000123456
From a Cold-War packet network with four nodes to a planet-scale fabric of seven billion devices in roughly fifty years. Click the buttons below to journey through TIME!
October 29, 1969, 22:30. Charley Kline at UCLA tries to log into Stanford Research Institute. He types L, O, and the system crashes. The first message on the ARPANET was, accidentally, "lo".
Key people: J.C.R. Licklider (1960 vision of "intergalactic network"), Larry Roberts, Bob Taylor, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran (packet switching, RAND, 1964).
On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET switched off NCP and switched on TCP/IP. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's protocols, designed in 1973–74, allowed networks of networks to interconnect.
+--------------+ Application (HTTP, SMTP, DNS, FTP) | App | +--------------+ Transport (TCP, UDP) | Transport | +--------------+ Internet (IP, ICMP) | IP | +--------------+ Link (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, PPP) | Link | +--------------+
The genius: routers don't need to understand applications. Each layer hides the one below.
Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal in March 1989 titled "Information Management: A Proposal." His boss Mike Sendall scribbled "vague but exciting." By Christmas 1990 he had built three things on a NeXT cube:
In April 1993 CERN released the Web into the public domain. By the end of 1994 there were ~10,000 servers; by 1996, half a million.
Netscape's August 1995 IPO closed at $58.25 from a $28 offering — the bell that started the bubble. Pets.com, Webvan, Boo.com burned billions. The NASDAQ peaked at 5,048 on March 10, 2000 and bottomed at 1,114 in October 2002.
| Year | Hosts (mil.) | Notable |
|---|---|---|
| 1993 | 1.3 | Mosaic released |
| 1995 | 16 | Amazon, eBay launch |
| 1998 | 30 | Google founded |
| 2000 | 93 | Bubble peak |
| 2003 | 171 | Friendster, MySpace, blogs |
Amazon launched S3 in March 2006 and EC2 that August. By 2018, AWS was a $25B/year business and the public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) was the default deployment target. CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare) flattened latency; mobile broadband closed the user-side gap.
ActivityPub became a W3C Recommendation in January 2018. Mastodon shipped in 2016. After Twitter's 2022 acquisition, Mastodon, Bluesky (AT Protocol), Threads (federating in 2024), and Nostr collectively re-established the idea that no single company should own the social graph.
W3C standard. Server-to-server federation via signed JSON-LD objects.
Bluesky's PDS + relay + AppView design. Account portability via DIDs.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| RFC | Request for Comments — the IETF's standards-track docs since 1969 (RFC 1). |
| DNS | Domain Name System — Paul Mockapetris, 1983 (RFC 882/883). |
| HTTP | HyperText Transfer Protocol — TBL 1991, formalized 1996 (RFC 1945). |
| HTTPS | HTTP over TLS. Universally adopted post-2018 thanks to Let's Encrypt. |
| BGP | Border Gateway Protocol — what stitches the inter-AS routing fabric together. |
2004–2012 — The Social Era
Web 2.0: read-write, identity-bound, ad-funded. Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), iPhone (2007), Instagram (2010). Open protocols (RSS, XMPP, OAuth 1.0) gradually gave way to closed APIs and walled gardens.