The implementation of the new internet protocol IPv6 (a standard for electronic communications) is underway. Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks are among some of the major organisations offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to create visibility and to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out. We have to make room for the next billion internet users! I compiled this punch list of the internet’s history. I am sure the list is not complete, but it was interesting to compile it.
1973 The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiates a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds.
1986 The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiates the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet.
1988 Jarkko Oikarinen invents Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing that is widely in use today.
1988 ‘The network is the computer’ .. a phrase credited to John Gage from Sun Microsystems.
1992 The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered to provide leadership in internet- related standards, education, and policy. The number of hosts breaks 1,000,000.
1994 Electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford University creates a website named “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which later becomes Yahoo!
1995 Online dial-up service providers (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access.
1996 Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years).
1996 Google starts as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP).
1998 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is established in Marina Del Rey, California. Before the establishment of ICANN, the Government of the United States controlled the domain name system of the internet.
1998 Netscape releases the source code for its Netscape Navigator browser to the public domain. Microsoft releases Windows 98 with its Internet Explorer browser integrated into the desktop. It showed Bill Gates’ determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet but it brought court challenges and penalties to their dominance.
1999 Did Al Gore create the Internet? Al Gore makes his famous/ infamous statement ‘During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet’ according to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer. To be fair : Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970’s to the present .
2001 The first commercial launch of a 3G (Third Generation) commercially automated cellular network is done in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard, enabling text messaging, MMS, email and Internet access.
2004 Mark Zuckerberg starts writing the code for Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. The social networking website that was at first only available to Harvard students, today has 600 million members worldwide.
2007 Apple releases its first iPhone. It would soon change the mobile handset interface paradigm from hard-ware based to software based. .
2011 The internet runs out of addresses! Internet Protocal version 4 (IPv4) allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses. The new protocol IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses.