History of 'net and 'web

History of 'net and 'web
(Grant's version)

1957 -- Sputnik launched -- US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to establish US lead in science and technology

1969 -- ARPANET -- connected four computers over telephone lines.

1972 -- Universities had access to what was by then called the Internet.
Visually boring but very useful (MARC, OCLC).

1975 -- Bill Gates buys, then sells DOS to IBM.

1984 -- The first Macintosh. Remember Hypercard?

1989 -- AOL introduces GUI for Apple II & Macintosh -- still pretty boring.

1990-92 -- Pictures and sounds displayed and exchanged. Tim Berners-Lee (CERN) combined various elements as "World Wide Web":

Ted Nelson had developed concept of Hypertext in 1960.

HTML Hypertext Markup Language, allowed pages to display different fonts and sizes, "imbedded" pictures, colors etc.,
( What is HTML? )
Douglas Engelbart had invented the mouse in 1963.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) -- a unique address for every web page. No need for cumbersome IP address numbers.
1992 -- About 26 sites existed in places like University of Illinois, where Mark Andreesen creates the Mosaic for Unix.

1993 -- Mosaic introduced for Mac and "PC" and . . .
CERN declares WWW technology to be freely usable by anyone, no fees being payable to CERN. Visionary and VERY important.

1994 -- A million browser copies in use! Tim Berners-Lee at World Wide Web Consortium administers development of Word Wide Web Standards including HTML.

1994 to 2000 -- Massive growth -- Internet era begins.

Mid-1990's -- First search engines, Google establishes a dominant market position.

1994 -- Amazon concept was developed in 1994, Web grows by an astonishing 2300 percent!

1998 -- 750,000 commercial sites on the Web, making major changes to existing industries.

2005 -- Today, The World Wide Web is one element of the Internet, a very large global network comprised of thousands of smaller networks.