From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Internet & Networking Timeline

By the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 BCE) the Persian Royal Road ran some 2,857 km from the city of Susa on the lower Tigris to the port of Smyrna (modern Izmir in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea.  A highway built by the Persian king of kings Darius I to facilitate rapid communication throughout the Persian Empire,  the Royal Road was protected by Persian rulers and later used by the Romans. On this road couriers, riding in relays, could travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) in seven or nine days.

Herodotus wrote:

“There is nothing that travels faster, and yet is mortal, than these couriers; the Persians invented this system, which works as follows. It is said that there are as many horses and men posted at intervals as there are days required for the entire journey, so that one horse and one man are assigned to each day. And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible. The first courier passes on the instructions to the second, the second to the third, and from there they are transmitted from one to another all the way through, just as the torchbearing relay is celebrated by the Hellenes in honor of Hephaistos. The Persians call this horse-posting system the angareion" (Strassler [ed] The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories [2007] 8.98, p. 642). 

By having fresh horses and riders ready at each relay, royal couriers may have carried messages the entire distance in 7 to 9 days, though normal travelers, or an army on foot, might have taken about three months. This Royal Road linked into many other routes in the overall trade network known as the Silk Road. Some of these roads, such as the routes to India and Central Asia, were also protected, encouraging regular contact between India, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. There are accounts in the Old Testament Book of Esther of dispatches being sent from Susa to provinces as far out as India and Cush (Kush) during the reign of Xerxes (485-465 BCE).

"The postal system during the reign of Xerxes I is also described in the Biblical Book of Esther. While the historical details of the Book of Esther are difficult to verify, it would appear that a swift messenger system connecting all provinces of the Persian Empire was at the disposal of the ruler. In this case, the system was used not to gather information about provincial affairs but to send royal decrees throughout the realm. Thus, when Hāmān secured the King’s permission to kill the Jews of the empire, ‘Letters were sent by courier to all the King’s provinces with orders to destroy, slay and exterminate all Jews’ (Esther 3: 13). When, through the efforts of Mordecai and Esther, the King agreed to spare the Jews, ‘Letters were sent by mounted couriers riding on horses from the royal stable. By these letters the King granted permission to the Jews in every city to unite and defend themselves …’ (8: 10); thus ‘the couriers, mounted on their royal horses, were despatched post-haste at the King’s urgent command; and the decree was issued also in Susa the capital’ (8: 14).

"In this case, the Achaemenid postal system was employed to circulate royal decrees throughout the provinces of the empire, using riders ‘on horses from the royal stable’. The English translation of these verses is deceptively readable and cannot be seen as loyal to the complexities of the original Hebrew text. For instance, the term aḥashtranīm (Esther 8: 10, 14) used to describe the royal mounts has conveniently been ignored in the English version. In fact, this word is a hapax legomenon and has generated exegetical controversy" (Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Islamic World [2007] http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521858687&ss=exc, accessed 01-14-2010).

Until the development of effective optical telegraph systems at the end of the 18th century, messengers on horseback, riding over a good road system,  remained the fastest method of sending a message overland.

According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Aeneas Tacticus, one of the earliest Greek writers on the art of war, invented the hydraulic telegraph about this time. It was a semaphore system used during the First Punic War to send messages between Sicily and Carthage.

"The system involved identical containers on separate hills; each container would be filled with water, and a vertical rod floated within. The rods were inscribed with various predetermined codes.

"To send a message, the sending operator would use a torch to signal the receiving operator; once the two were synchronized, they would simultaneously open the spigots at the bottom of their containers. Water would drain out until the water level reached the desired code, at which point the sender would lower his torch, and the operators would simultaneously close their spigots."

The emperor Augustus creates the Cursus publicus, the courier service of the Roman empire, to transport messages, officials, and tax revenues from one province to another.

Though Augustus based the Roman system on the Persian model of relay riders passing a message from one courier to the next, he switched to a system in which one man made the entire journey carrying the message. This had the advantage of enabling the messenger to be questioned regarding additional information, and it may have provided additional security.  However, it also slowed down the speed of communication.

Various authorities have  estimated that the average speed of a messenger over the Roman road system was about 50 miles per day—a substantial reduction in speed from the relay methods used by the Persian Empire.

It has also been estimated from surviving accounts of Roman voyages that the fastest Roman ships sailed at five knots or 120 miles per day in good weather and two knots or 50 miles per day in unfavorable weather.

Claude Chappe his brother send the first transmission over their optical telegraph: “si vous reussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory).

The initial experimental line ran between Brulon and Parce, a distance of ten miles (16 km).

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeds in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph. 

The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria, and communicated  news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

"The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes. Paris to Strasbourg with 50 stations was the next line and others followed soon after."

Chappe's system was the first widely adopted system to transmit messages overland faster than a messager or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. (See Reading 5.1.)

The Chappe optical telegraph eventually covered France with "a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres." It was be used for military and national communications until the 1850s.

"By 1824, the Chappe brothers were promoting the semaphore lines for commercial use, especially to transmit the costs of commodities. Napoleon Bonaparte saw the military advantage in being able to transmit information between locations, and carried a portable semaphore with his headquarters. This allowed him to coordinate forces and logistics over longer distances than any other army of his time. However because stations had to be within sight of each other, and because the efficient operation of the network required well trained and disciplined operators, the costs of administration and wages were a continuous source of financial difficulties."

Samuel F. B. Morse transmits the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that will become standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It was “What hath God wrought?”

The Morse Code became the first widely used data code.

The Atlantic Cable is proposed.

The first WH Smith railway bookstall is opened.

Railroad transportation provided a whole new market for printing, publishing, and bookselling. Inexpensive novels or "Yellowbacks" were published to supply a wider range of society. It became a common practice to publish novels in weekly, fortnightly or monthly parts to spread the cost.

John and Jacob Brett lay the first telegraph cable between England and France.

After a French fisherman cut the cable, thinking it was a new kind of seaweed, they installed an armored cable in 1851 that lasted for many years.

Paul Julius Reuter (originally named Israel Beer Josaphat) sets up an information service, later called Reuters, using a "fleet of 45 carrier pigeons",  to deliver news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, terminal points of the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines.

Reuter's pigeons carried the messages between Brussels and Aachen within two hours, beating the railroad by six hours.

Paris and London are connected by telegraph.

Reuters opens offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

Telegraph lines connect New York and San Francisco.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable takes place.

The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

The Great Eastern lays the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland.

Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

German scientist, philosopher and science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz publishes a story entitled Die Universalbibliothek, describing a library which is universal in the sense that it not only contains all existing written works, but all possible written works.

"In 1901 Kurd Lasswitz wrote a short story, 'The Universal Library,' elaborated upon by Jorge Luis Borges as 'The Library of Babel' in 1941. 'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness,' Borges explained. 'All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose solution did not exist.' Borges described the library in magical tones, whereas Lasswitz, a mathematician as well as a philosopher, got down to practical details. 'You say that everything will be in the library? The complete works of Goethe? The Bible? The works of all the classical philosophers?" Professor Wallhausen's companion, the magazine editor Max Burkel, asked. 'Yes, and with all the variations in wording nobody has thought up yet. You'll find the lost works of Tacitus and their translations into all living and dead languages. Furthermore, all of my and my friend Burkel's future works, all forgotten and still undelivered speeches in all parliaments, the official version of the Universal Declaration of Peace, the history of all the subsequent wars...'

" 'I'm going to subscribe right now,' Burkel exclaimed. 'This will furnish me with all the future volumes of my magazine; I won't have to read manuscripts any more!' Professor Wallhausen decided to calculate how many volumes (a large but finite number) the universal library would have to contain.  ' 'Will you — ' he turned to his daughter — 'hand me a sheet of paper and a pencil from my desk?' Max Burkel added, 'Bring the logarithm table too.' After a few minutes Wallhausen had the result, and wrote it down: 10^2,000,000.

" 'You make your life easy,' remarked Mrs. Wallhausen. 'Why don't you write it down in the normal manner?'

" 'Not me. This would take me at least two weeks, without time out for food and sleep. If you printed that figure, it would be a little over two miles long.'

' 'What is the name of that figure?' the daughter wanted to know.

"It has no name," Wallhausen replied.

"The number of books in the Universal Library lies somewhere between a googol (10^100) and a googolplex (10^googol), numbers which were named, by 8-year-old Milton Sirotta and his uncle Edward Kasner, in 1938. In Lasswitz's tale, Wallhausen went on to demonstrate that there would not be enough room in the visible universe to contain all possible printed books. Editor Max Burkel's hope for the 'elimination of the author from the literary business' was doomed" (Edge: The Third Culture, "The Universal Library" by George Dyson, 11.30.05, accessed 05-25-2009).

E. M. Forster publishes a short story entitled The Machine Stops.

Describing a world in which people live beneath the surface of the earth, with technology running virtually all aspects of their lives, the story anticipated instant messaging and videoconferencing with a machine called "the speaking apparatus." It also anticipated television with a machine called the "cinematophote."

The only book that the main character in the story uses is an enormous technical manual about "the Machine."

Reacting to H. G. Wells's optimism about science and technology, and fearing that man might be unable to live without the all-encompassing technology that he created, or eventually might not even remember that the technology was man-made, Forster stressed the value of actual or direct experience versus "virtual" experience.

The AT&T long-distance telegraph network begun in 1885 finally reaches from New York to San Francisco, allowing Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas J. Watson in San Francisco to participate in the first transcontinental telephone call.

"Four locations participated in the first call. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and co-founder of AT&T, led a group of dignitaries in New York. His one-time assistant Thomas Watson, led a group in San Francisco. AT&T President Theodore Vail spoke from Jekyll Island, Ga. And U.S. President Woodrow Wilson spoke from the White House.  

At one point during the call, someone asked Professor Bell if he would repeat the first words he ever said over the telephone. He obliged, picking up the phone and repeating 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.' To which Watson, in San Francisco, replied, 'It would take me a week now.' "(http://www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/transcontinental.html, accessed 01-24-2010).

Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, publishes Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process, in which he describes a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

H. G. Wells publishes a book of essays and speeches entitled World Brain which includes an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia."

This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" described Wells' vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49)

Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

Argentine writer and library Jorge Luis Borges publishes the short story La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel) in his collection of stories entitled El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). In 1962 two different English-language translations of The Library of Babel appeared: one by James E. Irby in a collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the Ficciones. A new translation by Andrew Hurley appeared in 1998 as part of a translation of the Collected Fictions. Hurley's translation of The Library of Babel was republished separately in 2000 by David R. Godine with reproductions of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières illustrating Borges' text.

Borges' story of a universe in the form of a library, or an imaginary universal library has been viewed as a fictional or or philosophical predictor of characteristics and criticisms of the Internet.

"Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

"Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the 'Crimson Hexagon', containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God" (Wikipedia article on The Library of Babel, accessed 05-25-2009).

Vannevar Bush publishes an article entitled "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 176, No. 1 [1945] 641-49) describing the Memex, an electromechanical microfilm machine evolved from his "Rapid Selector "project, capable of making permanent associative links in information. This hypothetical  machine foreshadowed aspects of the personal computer and hyperlinks on the Internet. (See Reading 13.1.)

Richard W. Hamming publishes Error Detecting and Error Codes. (See Reading 12.3.)

The first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, becomes operational.

Since 1927 very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. Radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried pnly around 2000 calls per year.

Fernando J. Corbató and team at MIT develop one of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System.)

CTSS had one of the first computerized text formatting utilities, called RUNOFF, the precursor of word processing, and one of the first inter-user messaging implementations, presaging instant messaging and electronic mail.

British science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke publishes a short story entitled "Dial F for Frankenstein.

". . . it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems" (John Markoff, "The Coming Superbrain," New York Times, May 24, 2009).

"The father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee credits Clarke's short story, Dial F for Frankenstein, as an inspiration" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-turns-to-fact-799519.html, accessed 05-24-2009).

Leonard Kleinrock submits his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.

Kleinrock's thesis proposal was the first paper on what later came to be known as data communications, or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.)

Leonard Kleinrock publishes "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This was the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. Kleinrock's MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, elaborated on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

J.C.R. Licklider and Welden E. Clark publish “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

J.C. R. Licklider is appointed Director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Licklider's  initial budget was $10,000,000 per year. Licklider eventually initiated the sequence of events leading to ARPANET.

J.C.R. Licklider sends a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly calls the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent.” (Waldrop)

Leonard Kleinrock publishes his 1962 PhD thesis in book form as Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, providing a technology and mathematical theory of data communications. (See Reading 13.4.)

Paul Baran writes On Distributed Communications, describing the use of redundant routing and message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, becomes operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

The Homestead Meeting between J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts sparks Roberts to undertake the creation of the ARPANET.

Though its exact history is murky, email begins as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate. Among the first systems to have this facility were System Development Corporation (SDC) (Q32) and MIT (CTSS).

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson publishes "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM Annual Conference/Annual Meeting archive Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

Charles K. Kao and George A. Hockham of the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC)  promote the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers may be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication.

Kao and Hockham proposed that the attenuation in fibers available at the time was caused by impurities, which could be removed, rather than by fundamental physical effects such as scattering. Later fiber optic communication became the technology enabling the Internet backbone.

In 2009 Charles Kao received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." A more detailed account of Kao's work, placing it in historical perspective, was prepared by the Nobel Prize Committee and may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

Lawrence Roberts does the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 to System Development Corporation's Q32.

This was the first time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets were used to communicate between computers.

Lawrence Roberts writes Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers, describing networking research at MIT.

Lawrence Roberts becomes ARPA IPTO (Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Technology Office) Chief Scientist and begins the design of the ARPANET. The ARPANET program as proposed to Congress by Roberts  explored computer resource sharing and packet switching communications to ensure reliability.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies.

This was an experiment in packet switching.

Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborate on the first hypertext editing system, based on Nelson's concept of hypertext.

They developed the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

At the ARPANET Design Session held by Lawrence Roberts at the ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wesley Clark suggests the use of mini-computers for network packet switches instead of using the main frame computers on the Arpanet for switching.

These machines were called Interface Message Processors.

The Department of Defense requests the Director of the Advanced Research Planning Agency (ARPA) to form a Task Force “to study and recommend hardware and software safeguards that would satisfactorily protect classified information in multi-access, resource-sharing computer systems.” Their report was published in 1970.

Donald Davies introduces the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper called “A Digital Communications Network for Computers.”

Lawrence Roberts publishes the first paper on the design of the ARPANET: “Multiple computer networks and intercomputer communication.” (See Reading 13.5)

J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor publish The Computer as a Communication Device in which they describe features of the future ARPANET. (See Reading 13.6.)

Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs.

This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.

Compuserve is founded as a way to generate income from Golden United mainframe computers during non-business hours.

Comcast became the first commercial online service in the United States.

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodies peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

The first ARPANET node is installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center.

Leonard Kleinrock established the first network connection between a network packet switch called an Interface Message Processor , ancestor of today's routers, and a time-shared host computer. (See Reading 13.7.)

The first message is sent over the ARPANET from Leonard Kleinrock’s UCLA computer to the second node at Stanford Research Institute’s computer.

The message was simply “Lo.”

Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii builds ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet-switched data network, using packet radio.

Unlike the ARPANET where each node could talk to a node on the other end, ALOHA used a shared medium for transmission and revealed the need for contention management schemes. ALOHA’s situation was similar to issues that were later faced by Ethernet (non-switched) and Wi-Fi networks.

Robert D. Maurer and his team, working for Corning Glass, obtain the crucial attenuation level of 20 dB required for optical fiber telecommunications.

The group demonstrated a fiber with 17 dB optic attenuation per kilometer by doping silica glass with titanium. A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB/km using germanium dioxide as the core dopant. Such low attenuations improved optical fiber telecommunications and enabled the Internet.

ARPANET establishes a node at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, thereby spanning the U.S.

The ARPANET has 15 nodes (23 hosts).

Ray Tomlinson at BBN develops email for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.

Lawrence Roberts of ARPA writes the first email management program, RD, to list incoming messages and support forwarding, filing, and responding to them.

Probably the world's first online community begins to emerge through online forums, and the message board called PLATO Notes developed by David Woolley, in the PLATO IV system evolving at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein establish the first public computerized bulletin board system (BBS) called Community Memory in Berkeley, California.

Community Memory used hard-wired terminals in neighborhoods as distinct from the first public dial-up CBBS noticed on February 16, 1978 in this database.

"Community Memory ran off an XDS-940 timesharing computer located in Resource One in San Francisco. The first terminal was an ASR-33 Teletype at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley. You could leave messages and attach keywords to them. Other people could then find messages by those keywords.

"The line from San Francisco to Berkeley ran at 110 baud - 10 characters per second. The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" playing in the record store. Musicians loved it - they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars. And out of it also emerged the first net personality - Benway, as he called himself."

The first ARPANET international connections are established to University College, London and NORSAR (Norway).

Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn invent the word Internet about this time as an abbreviation for the "inter-networking of networks" (Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet [1998] 111).

IBM announces Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a networking protocol for computing systems. SNA was a uniform set of rules and procedures for computer communications to free computer users from the technical complexities of communicating through local, national, and international computer networks.

Working at IBM, Charles F. Goldfarb develops the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

SGML became an ISO accepted standard on October 15, 1986.  

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn publish “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in which they describe the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). (See Reading 13.8.)

Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC invents Ethernet.

Initially the speed of Ethernet was three megabits per second. Ethernet evolved "into the most widely implemented physical and link layer protocol."

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene—a "community" specializing in the distribution of pirated content—started emerging around this time. It was used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups who made their work public on privately run BBS systems.

"The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications" (Wikipedia article on the Warez scene, accessed 07-20-2009).

Robert Metcalf and David Boggs publish the first detailed description of ethernet: Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks.

The first crude demonstration of the Internet Protocol Suite, TCP/IP occurs. It allows almost any two networks to join together.

A DEC sales representative attempts to send the first intentional commercial spam to every Arpanet address on the West Coast.

The sender, Gary Thuerk, thought that Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated ARPANET protocol support directly into the new DECSYSTEM-20 and TOPS-20 OS.

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a sociologist, and Murray Turoff, a professor of computer science, show how "computer-mediated communication" could develop social networking in their book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer.

Compuserve becomes the first online service to offer personal computer users email communication and online technical support. The following year it will offer real-time chat online with its CB simulator.

Robert Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet, founds 3Com.

Metcalf convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox

"to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard, the so-called 'DIX' standard, for 'Digital/Intel/Xerox'; it standardized the 10 megabits/second Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit type field. The standard was first published on September 30, 1980. It competed with two largely proprietary systems, token ring and ARCNET, but those soon found themselves buried under a tidal wave of Ethernet products."

Duke University graduate Students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis establish USENET, one of the first computer network communications systems. 

USENET was conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET."

The first newsgroups seem to have been established virtually at the inception of USENET.

"The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.

" At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton. But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet" (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x10, accessed 01-16-2010).

There are 213 hosts on ARPANET; a new host is added approximately every 20 days.

The U.S. National Science Foundation funds CSNET (the "Computer Science Network") with leadership by Larry Landweber and David J. Farber.

CSNET was a computer network linking academic Computer Science departments nationwide—an alternative to ARPANET, to which many Computer Science departments did not have the privilege of access. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange.

DCA (Defense Communications Agency) and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and IP (Internet Protocol), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This leads to one of the first definitions of an “internet” as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and the “Internet” as connected TCP/IP internets.

ARPANET splits into ARPANET and MILNET. MILNET, designed for unclassified U.S. Department of Defense traffic, will be integrated into the Defense Data Network that was created the previous year.

ARPANET requires that all connected machines use TCP/IP. TCP/ IP becomes the core Internet protocol and replaces NCP (Network Control Program) entirely.

The Domain Name System (DNS), designed by Paul V. Mockapetris, is introduced for ARPANET.

The six original domains were .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int.

At Lehigh University, Frederick Cohen demonstrates a virus-like program on a VAX11/750 system. The program is able to install itself to, or infect, other system objects.

In 1984 Cohen used the phrase "computer virus" – as suggested by his teacher Leonard Adleman – to describe the operation of such programs in terms of "infection". He defined a 'virus' as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.”

Moderated newsgroups are introduced on USENET.

The number of hosts connected to the Internet exceeds 1000.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), is officially broken up, ending a long-established monopoly on telephone service.

AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, known as "Baby Bells." AT&T, reduced in value by about 70%, continued to run all its long distance services.

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner from Stanford University found Cisco Systems. named the company for San Francisco, gateway to the Pacific Rim.

Symbolics.com becomes the first registered domain on the Internet.

Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant found The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, one of the first online communities. It later became  known as The WELL, and connected to the Internet in 1992.

Quantum Computer Services launches an online bulletin-board service, Quantum Link (Q-Link), for users of Commodore-64 and 128 personal computers. The company renamed itself America Online (AOL) in 1991.

The number of hosts on the ARPANET/Internet exceeds five thousand.

The National Science Foundation approves funding for the Internet backbone.

The National Science Foundation Network connects five new supercomputer centers and allows access to these centers at no cost. The centers, which the NSF funded in 1985, were: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

NSFNET used a TCP/IP-based protocol compatible with ARPANET, as a backbone to which regional and academic networks would connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic.  As a result of a November 1987 NSF award to a consortium of universities in Michigan, the original 56- kbit/s links was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s by July 1988 and again to 45 Mbit/s in 1991.

"The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the Internet, and its broad commercialization in the mid-1990s. Basically, the NSFNET opened up the Internet to the world. Some critical Internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in Internet history. BGP was specifically created to allow the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes learned via multiple paths from originally the Arpanet, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the Internet into a meshed infrastructure, backing away from the single-core architecture which the Arpanet had been using before."

The Brain boot sector virus (aka Pakistani flu) is released. Brain is considered the first IBM PC compatible virus, and the program responsible for the first IBM PC compatible virus epidemic. Also known as Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, the virus was created in Lahore, Pakistan by 19 year old Pakistani programmer, Basit Farooq Alvi, and his brother, Amjad Farooq Alvi.

The Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1986 SGML) is accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

SGML is:

"an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 defines generalized markup:

"Generalized markup is based on two novel postulates:

"Markup should describe a document's structure and other attributes, rather than specify the processing to be performed on it, as descriptive markup need be done only once, and will suffice for future processing. Markup should be rigorous so that the techniques available for processing rigorously-defined objects like programs and data bases, can be used for processing documents as well.

"SGML descended from IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) that Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie developed in the 1960s. Goldfarb, editor of the international standard, coined the 'GML' term using their surname initials. As a document markup language, SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable large-project documents in government, law, and industry. Many of these documents must remain readable for several decades — a long time in the information technology field. SGML also was extensively applied by the military, and the aerospace, technical reference, and industrial publishing businesses. The advent of the XML profile has made SGML suitable for widespread application for small-scale, general-purpose use" (Wikipedia article on Standard Generalized Markup Language. accessed 12-29-2009).

The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds ten thousand.

Programmer and photographer Bill Atkinson writes HyperCard for Apple Computer. 

HyperCard was one of the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. "It combined database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also featured HyperTalk, written by Dan Winkler, a powerful and easy-to-learn programming language for manipulating data and the user interface. HyperCard users often employed it as a programming system for Rapid Application Development of different kinds of applications, database and otherwise.

Richard L. Adams, Jr. founds UUNET Communications Services, the first commercial internet service provider. On May 12 UUNET passed its first traffic via the CompuServe Network using UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Protocol).

"Although the ISP initially offered services only to research institutes and universities, it wasn't long before Adams began expanding operations. The launch of AlterNet in 1990 marked UUnet's first foray into commercial service, as well as its conversion to a for-profit company. The firm's new focus on the corporate sector paid off a few years later when it landed the contract to carry Internet traffic for the Microsoft Network, beating out competitors like AT&T Corp. and MCI Communications Corp. Adams took UUnet public in 1995, in one of the largest technology public offerings to date, and a year later agreed to a $2 billion buyout offer from MFS Communications, which was acquired by WorldCom shortly thereafter" (http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/2/Adams-Richard-L.html, accessed 02-28-2009).

C. Gordon Bell, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Computer Networking, Infrastructure and Digital Communications of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology, publishes A Report to the Office of Technology Policy on Computer Networks to Support Research in the United States. A Study of Critical Problems and Future Options. The report states:

“Over the next 15 years, there will be a need for a 100,000 times increase in national network capacity to enable researchers to exploit computer capabilities for representing complex data in visual form, for manipulating and interacting with this complex data and for sharing large data bases with other researchers.”

“As the first step, the current Internet system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the networks supported by agencies for researchers should be interconnected. These facilities, if coordinated and centrally managed, have the capability to interconnect many computer networks into a single virtual computer network. As the second step, the existing computer networks that support research programs should be expanded and upgraded to serve 200-400 research institutions with 1.5 million bits per second capabilities.

“As the third step, network service should be provided to every research institution in the U.S., with transmission speeds of three billion bits per second.” (p. 3)

Bell summarizes the report in an article called Toward A National Research Telecommunications Network.

Lotus introduces Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates.

Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [PLATO Notes is noticed in this database.]

Z39.50 becomes the international standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval.

Z39.50 made it possible for a user to search and retrieve information from other computer systems without knowing the search syntax used by those other systems.

Joseph D. Becker of Xerox Corporation, Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple develop a universal character set.

Becker coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project in his report, Unicode 88:

"1.1. Abstract

"This document is a draft proposal for the design of an international/multilingual text character coding system, tentatively called Unicode.

"Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as 'wide-body ASCII' that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.

"In the Unicode system, a simple unambiguous fixed-length character encoding is integrated into a coherent overall architecture of text processing. The design aims to be flexible enough to support many disparate (vendor-specific) implementations of text processing software.

"A general scheme for character code allocations is proposed (and materials for making specific individual character code assignments are well at hand), but specific code assignments are not proposed here. Rather, it is hoped that this document will evoke interest from many organizations, which could cooperate in perfecting the design and in determining the final character code assignments" (http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf, accessed 01-29-2010).

The first computer worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm or Internet worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, quickly infects a great number of computers on the Internet.

"It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD Unix and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received three years probation, community service and a fine in excess of $10,000."

The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds 100,000.

The first gateways between private e-mail carriers and the Internet are established. CompuServe is connected through Ohio State University, MCI through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories recognizes that a viewer or listener does not need to download the entirety of a program to view or listen to a portion of it, as long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest the data. At the InterTainment '89 conference held in New York City Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. It became the basis for "webcasting."

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN writes Information Management: A Proposal, proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. 

In his words, this was a "an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was 'Mesh' "

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, students at McGill University, write ARCHIE, a program designed to index FTP archives.

ARCHIE was the first “search engine,” as distinct from a “web search engine.”

Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow found the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is founded. By the end of its first year its membership consisted of 18 institutions.

ARPANET discontinues operations and merges into the Internet

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN issues World Wide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project.

Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web page on a NeXT workstation.

During the Christmas holiday Tim Berners-Lee writes the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:

1, The first web browser called WorldWideWeb.

2. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

3. The first Web server, CERN httpd. It was operational on Christmas Day 1990.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET Backbone Network, clearing the way for electronic commerce.

The first webcam, called the CoffeeCam, points at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University.

"The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. Employing the X Window System protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web." (quoted from the Trojan Room Coffee Machine article in Wikipedia, accessed 11-23-2008).

The camera was finally switched off on August 22, 2001. The final image captured by the camera may still be viewed at its homepage.(Accessed 11-23-2008).

Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines invents the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system.  It is client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index databases on remote computers.

Tim Berners-Lee releases the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, to a number of people at CERN.

This release introduced the web to the high energy physics community and began the spread of the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary by Tim Berners-Lee, posted on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, gives a short summary of the World Wide Web project, explains where to download a web server and line mode browser, making it available all over the world at no cost.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system."

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Mark P. McCahill and team at the University of Minnesota develop the Gopher protocol, "a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet.," but without hyperlinks, a significant disadvantage to the World Wide Web.

They announced the Internet Gopher on USENET. Its central goals were:

"* A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users

"* A simple syntax

"* A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively

"* Extending the file system metaphor to include things like searches

" The source of the name "Gopher" is claimed to be threefold:

"1. Users instruct it to 'go for' information

"2. It does so through a web of menu items analogous to gopher holes

"3. The sports teams of the University of Minnesota are the Golden Gophers (Wikipedia article on Gopher (protocol), accessed 06-04-2009).

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law is decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

Through the efforts of  physicist and software developer Paul Kunz and Terry Hung, the first web server in North America goes live at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

The first image posted to the web is a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes.

The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered.

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  found an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

There are 50 Web Servers on the Internet.

Traffic on the Internet expands at a 341,634 percent growth rate.

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photograph and develop a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. It is the first library of digital images on the Internet.

At this time it is estimated that in China, a country with about 1,000,000,000 people, only about 2000 people use the Internet.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is founded.

David Allen and Harold Williams found Teleport, the first commercially successful telepresence company. Its name was later changed to Teleport.

"The original intent was to develop a system that could allow families to interact across great distances without the hassle or costliness of flying. The first systems (which they called TeleSuites) looked more like something out of an upper class home rather than a conference room in an office suite. . . . " 

"In 1993 total Internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year" (http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.html, accessed 06-04-2009).

There are 250 web servers on the Internet.

Marc Andreesen announces on Usenet the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) introduces Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

CERN releases the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

Tim O’Reilly launches the Global Network Navigator. This the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it contains the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator will be sold to America Online in 1995.

Matthew Gray at MIT develops the web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer, to measure the size of the web.

Later in the year the World Wide Web Wanderer was used to generate an index called the "Wandex", providing thewhat was probably the first web search engine.

Alan Saperstein  of Visual Data Corporation, now Onstream Media, introduces streaming video with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. This is the beginning of video webcasting over the Internet.

"Everywhere on the global Internet, which is now roamed by an estimated 15 million computer users, the growth rates are staggering.

"At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill., a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October. Officials at the center say the only solution may be to take a $15 million supercomputer away from its normal scientific number-crunching duties and employ it full time as an electronic librarian.

"This year, information retrieved using a popular searching program called Gopher increased more than 400 percent, to almost 200 billion bytes a month -- about seven million newspaper pages" (John Markoff, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, accessed 06-04-2009).

Martijn Koster develops ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer, this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It will be demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994.

"Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

The number of websites reaches 10,000. There are 2500 web servers on the Internet.

The National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative makes its first six awards. One of these is The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project:

"This project . . . is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal' library, proving uniform access to the large number of emerging networked information sources and collections. These include both on-line versions of pre-existing works and new works and media of all kinds that will be available on the globally interlinked computer networks of the future. The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists. The technology developed in this project will provide the "glue" that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion."

An early web search engine, the World Wide Web Worm, has an index of 110,000 pages and web-accessible documents. It receives an average of 1500 queries per day.

The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to 155 Mbps as traffic passes 10 trillion bytes per month.

HTTP (Web) packets surpass FTP traffic as the largest-volume Internet protocol.

NSFNET reverts back to a research network, and the main U. S. backbone traffic now goes through interconnected network providers.

The first demonstration of wireless Internet access occurs at Bell Labs.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, publishes in Wired an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

This or a very similar text was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

On the Internet Kevin Hughes publishes a pioneering cultural and historical work entitled From Webspace to Cyberspace.

Jim Sterne launches the first "Marketing on the Internet" seminar series.

This eight-city tour was intended to promote the possibilities of using the Internet for advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service.

Commissioned to develop an Internet event for "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future," an arts weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Ivan Pope writes a proposal outlining the concept of a café with Internet access from the tables. Pope's Cybercafe, the first Internet cafe, operates during the weekend event.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  change the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang select the name because they like the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL is akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They will create the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Marc Andreesen, one of the programmers of Mosaic, and James H. Clark of Silicon Graphics found Mosaic Communications Corporation, the first company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser, and the first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.

Commercial spamming starts when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegeluse bulk Usenet postings to advertise immigration law services. This is called the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings: "Green Card Lottery-Final One?"

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, becomes operational. "Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public".

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcasts over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

The First International Conference on the World Wide Web takes place at CERN in Geneva.

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invents the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

Entepeneur Ariel Poler founds Internet Profiles Corporation ( I/PRO), the first commercial web analytics vendor, producer of the first log analyzer.

"The company emerged as the early market leader in the developing field of web usage measurement, partly because of its partnership with the venerable Neilsen Media Research . . . and Neilsen Media Services in . . . 1995." (Peters, Computerized Monitoring and Online Privacy [1999] 343).

Marc Andreesen of Mosaic Communications Corporation releases Mosaic Netscape 0.9, beta on USENET: 

"Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

"You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

"ftp.mcom.com in /netscape

"gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm

"lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape

"ftp.meer.net in /Netscape doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape

"archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape

"ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only) mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

"Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.  

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to rele...@mcom.com.  

"Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.  

"A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i...@mcom.com for more information.

"Have fun!

"Marc and the gang

i...@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/"

One month later, in November 1994 the company renamed itself Netscape Communications Corporation.

A Rolling Stones concert becomes the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opens the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse." (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) becomes the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC uses an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994. WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) starts streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this is WREK's beta launch and the stream will not be advertised until a later date.

WebtraffIQ.com develops the first commercial web page tagging system.

During this year up to 700 new web servers are registered each day, and there are approximately 73,500 servers. WWW is generally equated with the Internet.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founds craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It will evolve into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist will eventually make a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

Ward Cunningham establishes the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ You can watch a video of an interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum in 2006 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6nNqSASGo

Robert McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, and a group of collaborative software developers initially known as the Apache Group, make the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server software.

"Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server software in use. As of September 2009 Apache served over 54.48% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest."

"There have been two explanations of the project's name. According to the Apache Foundation, the name was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare. However, the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website, from 1996 to 2001, claimed that The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server. The first explanation was supported at an Apache Conference and in an interview in 2000 by Brian Behlendorf, who said that the name connoted 'Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass'. Behlendorf then contradicted this in a 2007 interview, stating that 'The Apache server isn't named in honor of Geronimo's tribe' but that so many revisions were sent in that 'the group called it 'a patchy Web server' '. Both explanations are probably appropriate" (Wikipedia article on Apache HTTP server, accessed 02-02-2010).

Stanford University Libraries found HighWire Press. Its initial publication is the online production of the weekly Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), "the most highly cited (and second largest) peer-reviewed journal."

A portion of its mission statement (June 1995) includes the following:

"Network-Based Scholarly Publishing:

A Prospectus

The Problems:

The problems of scholarly publishing - particularly for science, technology and medical information (STM) - are well documented:

It takes too long for authors to get work into the literature because of the author, reviewer, publisher, library, reader handoffs.

It is difficult and time consuming for readers to sort through all that is published.

It is increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire STM materials, which are advancing in price to research libraries at four to six times the c.p.i.

It is becoming impractical for publishers to deliver a timely and complete product that meets the needs of research scientists. As single events, these problems are each frustrating to scholars and those who serve them. In combination, these impediments are a significant barrier, and challenge the productivity and quality of science.

The Projects:

The Network Publishing project, dubbed "The HighWire Press," provides models of solutions for these problems by taking advantage of the special circumstances of scholarly communication - as distinct from entertainment or trade publishing - in the context of a University community: the writers and readers of scholarly materials are in the same profession, writing for each other, they are located in similar environments; and they do not seek profit from their publishing activities, which are a means to an end for them. Because of network-based communication technologies, the apparatus of a large publishing operation is becoming unnecessary for communication of scholarly results; this is true for the same reason that desktop publishing technologies a decade ago allowed a shift from large design and composition shops to desktop authorship backed up by small, responsive print shops. Essentially, our projects attempt to "re-engineer" traditional scholarly publishing to focus on formal, structured communication among the community of scholars."

Netscape Communications has a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now  becomes the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This is the beginning of IP/TV.

The Swedish Royal Library (Kungl. Biblioteket) initiates the Kulturarw3 Project - The Royal Swedish Web Archiw3e.

Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive.

This year more email is sent than paper mail.

There are 14,352,000 Internet hosts and 100,000 websites.

In response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow writes A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

"The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet" (Wikipedia article on Mobile web, accessed 04-25-2009).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, begin collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

Citation analysis, referenced in this database, was pioneered by Eugene Garfield beginning in 1955.

The first recorded use of the term "phishing" (baits used to "catch financial information and passwords) occurs on the "alt.online-service. America-online" Usenet newsgroup after AOL introduces measures to prevent using fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to open accounts. To obtain legitimate credit card information AOL crackers resorted to phishing.

Seachenginewatch.com goes online as "A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines."

The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition & Technology publishes the unclassified REPORT OF THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON INFORMATION WARFARE - DEFENSE (IW-D.

This 212-page report was a "call to arms" for cyber warfare or information warfare in the United States

The Internet2 consortium is established.

Michael Lesk attempts to calculate "How Much Information is There in the World?" He includes information on how much information a human brain may be able to retain.

Nettracker.com produces the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

The first Museums and the Web Conference takes place in Los Angeles. 

There are one million websites on the Internet.

Wireless Application Protocol or WAP is established as a secure specification that allows users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union all 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court vote to strike down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violate the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices concur in part and dissent in part to the decision. This is the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Court rules that "223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.

"The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the 'knowing' transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything 'that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs' " (Wikipedia article on Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union).

A human error at Network Solutions causes the Domain Name System (DNS) table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. In the four hours it took to repair the error the problem spread throughout the Internet.

Web search engine Altavista claims to handle 20,000,000 queries per day.

W3C releases the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels.

Voice over Internet equipment, using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), becomes available.

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger publish the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses:

“A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.” The manifesto is first published online, followed by a book.

Bell Labs reports the first long-distance transmission of one terabit (trillion bits) of data per second over a single strand of optical fiber.

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) begins the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP on January 10, 1998.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group publish on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. "The worldwide web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling life of less than one year."

Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf, of TCP/IP fame, publish on paper An Open Architecture for a Digital Library System and a Plan for its Development, describing "an open architecture for an important new kind of national information infrastructure."

The Internet Society (ISOC) meets to discuss the growing spam problem.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is founded to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN's tasks include responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. . .  ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes" (Wikipedia article in ICANN, accessed 05-16-2010).

The U. S. Supreme Court rules that Internet domain names are property.

The short range wireless networking standard, Bluetooth, is announced.

NTT DoCoMo introduces the mobile web to Japan with the first full internet service on mobile phones, and the first mobile-specific web browser. 

A massive denial-of-service attack is launched against major websites, including Yahoo!, Amazon and ebay.

There are 72,398,092 Internet hosts and 9,950,491 websites.

Web size estimates by Inktomi at this time surpassed 1 billion pages that could be indexed.

John D. Leckenby of The University of Texas at Austin and Hairong Li of Michigan State University found the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD).

The inaugural issue of the journal

"defined Interactive Advertising as the 'paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.' This is most commonly performed through the Internet as a medium" (Wikipedia article on Interactive advertising, accessed 04-22-2009).

Over 10,000,000 domain names have been registered.

The dot-com bubble, thought to have begun with the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995, reaches its climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52.

After this date the dot-com bubble began to burst.

There are 20,000,000 websites on the Internet; the number has doubled since February of this year.

The 19th Session of the National People's Congress of China adopts the Decision of the Standing Committee of NPC Regarding the Safeguarding of Internet Security.

NTT DoCoMo in Japan launches the first 3G (Third Generation) cellular network.

"3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony, video calls, and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Additional features also include HSPA data transmission capabilities able to deliver speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8 Mbit/s on the uplink" (Wikipedia article on 3G, accessed 04-11-2009).

At this time there are 147,344,723 Internet hosts and 36,689,008 websites (Cisco). The estimated number of Internet users worldwide is about 600,000,000.

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issue as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. It was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on these subjects.

Jim Sterne founds the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.This began as a web analytics conference but expanded into onlline marketing optimization.

In 2009 the series currently reached audiences throughout the year in Toronto, Munich, San Jose, London, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Washington D.C. and Mexico City.

Michael Day of UKOLN publishes a comprehensive review of worldwide projects for preservation of web data: Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web.

Apple opens the software based, online iTunes Store.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium  (IIPC,) netpreserve.org, is founded.

"In July 2003 the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library (UK), The Library of Congress (USA) and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations. This group of 12 institutions chartered the IIPC to fund and participate in projects and working groups to accomplish the Consortium’s goals. The initial agreement was in effect for three years, during which time the membership was limited to the charter institutions. Since then, membership has expanded to include additional libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions involved in Web archiving.

"The goals of the consortium are:

" * To enable the collection, preservation and long-term access of a rich body of Internet content from around the world.

" * To foster the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards for the creation of international archives.

" * To be a strong international advocate for initiatives and legislation that encourage the collection, preservation and access to Internet content.

" * To encourage and support libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions everywhere to address Internet content collecting and preservation."

Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and the Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu launch the peer-to-peer voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony service, Skype. The name of the company evolved from "Sky peer-to-peer" or "Skyper." However some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken, so the final "r" was dropped leaving "Skype," for which domain names were available. Skype was sold to eBay in September 2005.

Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo found Metblogs.com. In May 2009 the Metroblogging website characterized this as the world's largest "network of city-focused blogs, covering local issues in more than fifty cities around the world."  On May 24, 2009 there were 57 city-specific cities and more than 700 bloggers involved in Metroblogging, representing, among other things, a kind of news-gathering and broadcasting network.

800,000,000 people in the world are using the Internet.

There are 50,000,000 websites on the Internet.

Programmer Bram Cohen, author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, and entrepeneur Ashwin Navin found BitTorrent, Inc. in San Francisco.

The first Web 2.0 Conference is held in San Francisco.

"Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. . . .

Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 8,000,000 American adults say they have created blogs.

By Spring of 2005 it is estimated that over 100,000,000 people in China use the Internet.

The Internet Archive  has archived forty billion web pages from 1996 to this date.

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issues From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet.

Three former employees of Paypal -- Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim -- found the video sharing website, YouTube.

Lawrence Lessig launches Code 2.2 wiki:

"Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

"Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speculates that it may take three hundred years to index all the world's information and make it searchable.

" 'We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years,' Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. 'The answer is it's going to be a very long time.'

"Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed, he said earlier during his speech."

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launches the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

"a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

This was  the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

At the UC Berkeley School of Information Mitchell Kapor delivers an address entitled Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration.

"The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors."

The Wayback Machine, a digital time capsule at the Internet Archive, contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

Having initially registered the domain name for free, and then temporarily losing it to a con man, Gary Kremen wins a lawsuit and sells Sex.com for $14,000,000. This was the highest price obtained for a domain name at the time. Maybe ever?

In D-Lib Magazine researchers at Cornell University from the departments of Computer Science, Information Science, and the Cornell Theory Center describe plans for A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive.

Vital US infrastructure, including power grids and banking systems, are put under simulated attack in a week-long security exercise called Cyber Storm.

♦ FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S PUBLISHED INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULTS

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) successfully executed Cyber Storm, the first national cyber exercise Feb. 6 thru Feb. 10, 2006. The exercise was the first government-led, full-scale cyber security exercise of its kind. NCSD, a division within the department’s Preparedness Directorate, provides the federal government with a centralized cyber security coordination and preparedness function called for in the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7. NCSD is the focal point for the federal government’s interaction with state and local government, the private sector and the international community concerning cyberspace vulnerability reduction efforts."

"The Scenario

"The exercise simulated a sophisticated cyber attack campaign through a series of scenarios directed at several critical infrastructure sectors. The intent of these scenarios was to highlight the interconnectedness of cyber systems with physical infrastructure and to exercise coordination and communication between the public and private sectors. Each scenario was developed with the assistance of industry experts and was executed in a closed and secure environment.

"Cyber Storm scenarios had three major adversarial objectives:

"* To disrupt specifically targeted critical infrastructure through cyber attacks

"* To hinder the governments' ability to respond to the cyber attacks

"* To undermine public confidence in the governments' ability to provide and protect service" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1158340980371.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

♦ A LESS OPTIMISTIC INTERPRETATION FROM THE WIKIPEDIA

"The Cyber Storm exercise was a simulated exercise overseen by the Department of Homeland Security that took place February 6 through February 10, 2006 with the purpose of testing the nations defenses against digital espionage. The simulation was targeted primarily at American security organizations but officials from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand participated as well.

"Simulation

"The exercise simulated a large scale attack on critical digital infrastructure such as communications, transportation, and energy production. The simulation took place a series of incidents which included.

" * Washington's metro trains mysteriously shutting down.

" * Bloggers revealing locations of railcars containing hazardous materials. * The airport control towers of Philadelphia and Chicago mysteriously shutting down.

" * A mysterious liquid appearing on a London subway.

" * Significant numbers of people on "no fly" lists suddenly appearing at airports all over the nation.

" * Planes flying too close to the White House. * Water utilities in Los Angeles getting compromised.

"Internal difficulties

"During the exercise the computers running the simulation came under attack by the players themselves. Heavily censored files released to the Associated Press reveal that at some time during the exercise the organizers sent every one involved an e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" telling the participants in the simulation not to attack the game's control computers.

"Performance of participants

"The Cyber Storm exercise highlighted the gaps and shortcomings of the nation's cyber defenses. The cyber storm exercise report found that institutions under attack had a hard time getting the bigger picture and instead focused on single incidents treating them as 'individual and discrete.'

"In light of the test the Department of Homeland Security raised concern that the relatively modest resources assigned to cyber-defense would be 'overwhelmed in a real attack' (Wikipedia article on Cyber Storm Exercise, accessed 08-09-2009).

Marc Weber and William B. Pickett found the World Wide Web History Center.

In the New York Times Magazine Kevin Kelly publishes Scan this Book! -- an account of current developments working toward the "universal" digital library on the Internet.

"From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)"

The Chairman of Cisco systems, John Chambers, compares telepresence to teleporting in Star Trek, and says it will be potentially a billion dollar market.

There are more than 100 million websites on the Internet. Between January and November of this year 27.4 million sites have been added to the web. (According to Netcraft.com there are 101,435,253 sites on the Internet.)

Kevin Kelly writes in Wired Magazine:

"Information is expanding 10 times faster than any product on this planet - manufactured or natural. According to Hal Varian, an economist at UC Berkeley and a consultant to Google, worldwide information is increasing at 66 percent per year - approaching the rate of Moore's Law - while the most prolific manufactured stuff - paper, let’s say, or steel - averages only as much as 7 percent annually."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog.

Apple introduces the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting the largest cyber security exercise ever organized. Cyber Storm II is being held from March 10-14 in Washington, D.C. and brings together participants from federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the international community.

"Cyber Storm II is the second in a series of congressionally mandated exercises that will examine the nation’s cyber security preparedness and response capabilities. The exercise will simulate a coordinated cyber attack on information technology, communications, chemical, and transportation systems and assets.

" 'Securing cyberspace is vital to maintaining America’s strategic interests, public safety, and economic prosperity,' said Greg Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. 'Exercises like Cyber Storm II help to ensure that the public and private sectors are prepared for an effective response to attacks against our critical systems and networks.'

"Cyber Storm II will include 18 federal departments and agencies, nine states (Calif., Colo., Del., Ill., Mich., N.C., Pa., Texas and Va.), five countries (United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and more than 40 private sector companies. They include ABB, Inc., Air Products, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company Inc., Harris Corporation, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Microsoft, NeuStar, PPG Industries, and Wachovia" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1205180340404.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

According to World Internet Stats , 1,463,632,361 people now use the Internet, out of a  total world population of  6,676,120,288.

Google announces in its blog that it is indexing over one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs.

According to a Netcraft survey there are 181,277,835 active websites on the Internet.

Founded in 1995, craigslist, the leading classified advertising service in any medium, provides free local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries, generating more than 12 billion page views per month, used by more than 50 million people each month. Craigslist users self-publish more than 30 million new classified ads each month and more than 2 million new job listings each month. Each month craigslist also posts more than 100 million user postings in more than 100 topical forms. All of this it does with only 25 employees.

Because craigslist does not charge for classified advertising it has replaced a large portion of the classified advertising that historically was placed in print newspapers. By doing so it has substantially reduced the significant revenue that print newspapers historically generated from classified advertising. This has contributed to an overall reduction of profits for many print newspapers. Similarly, craigslist's policy of charging below-market rates for job listings has impacted that traditional source of newspaper revenue, and has impacted profits at physical employment agencies, and the more expensive online employment agencies.

T-Mobile announces the first cell phone powered by the Android operating system, developed by Google in association with the Open Handset Alliance.

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google announce a groundbreaking settlement agreement "on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books – Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books – Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online – Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries – Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project."

Apart from the historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, from the standpoint of the history of information and media, one element of this election and the campaign that preceded it was the blending of its coverage by broadcast media and the rapidly evolving interactive media on the Internet. Television networks repeatedly referred viewers to their websites for interactive news stories and additional information. While we watched the election on television or listened to radio we received information in emails, from websites, and from blogging and microblogging sites like Twitter. Within minutes after the election was decided I received an email from the Obama campaign signed by Barack Obama. Online newspapers updated election results in real time. Perhaps most remarkably, even the Wikipedia article on the United States presidential election 2008 was updated in real time on the web as election results were available. This I learned from reading a blog in The New York Times online—an online newspaper blogging about an article in an online encyclopedia. From the standpoint of the history of media this represents a blurring or blending of the historic distinctions that evolved over centuries between news media writing about the moment, and traditionally more static works of reference such as encyclopedias.

An email from info@barackobama.com received 10-04-08 8:18PM PST, 18 minutes after polls closed on the West coast and news media computers declared an Obama victory. Presumbably this email was sent to the millions of people who donated to Obama's campaign:

"Jeremy --

I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.
We just made history.
And I don't want you to forget how we did it.
You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change.
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next.
But I want to be very clear about one thing...
All of this happened because of you.
Thank you,

Barack"

The day after the presdidential election President-Elect Barack Obama launches the website, Change.gov to communicate details of the transition to the presidency.

Stanford University Libraries' HighWire Press, announces over the DIGLIB newsgroup that it  "reached a significant milestone this week with the posting of the five millionth article on its e-Publishing platform.  HighWire, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, provides technology and customized online services to 140 publishing partners ranging from independent non-profit societies and associations, to university presses and large commercial publishers.

"The milestone occurred while loading a substantial amount of journal backfiles on behalf of the American Medical Association. Bringing the HighWire total article count over the 5 million mark was an article dating from 1884, “Dermatitis Herpetiformis” by Louis A. Duhring, MD1, published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. The JAMA & Archives Journals Backfiles Collection will ensure that 125 years of high quality medical research will be available online at the journals’ Web sites on the HighWire platform."

At this time Highwire Press

"hosts the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1186 journals and 5,006,835 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made 2,015,269 articles free. With our partner publishers we produce 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals."

"BEIJING, China (CNN) -- China surpassed the United States in 2008 as the world's top user of the Internet, according to a government-backed research group.

"Nearly 91 percent of China's Internet users are surfing the Web with a broadband connection.  

"The number of Web surfers in the country grew by nearly 42 percent to 298 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center's January report. And there's plenty of room for growth, as only about 1 in every 4 Chinese has Internet access.  

"The rapid growth in China's Internet use can be tied to its swift economic gains and the government's push for the construction of telephone and broadband lines in the country's vast rural areas, the report says.  

"The Chinese government wants phone and broadband access in each village by 2010.

"Nearly 91 percent of China's Internet users are surfing the Web with a broadband connection -- an increase of 100 million from 2007. Mobile phone Internet users totaled 118 million by the end of 2008" (http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/14/china.internet/index.html, accessed 01-13-2010).

Ipoque estimates at this time that BitTorrent is responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic and 27-55% of all Internet traffic, depending on geographical location.

According to the article referenced below, the entire archived content of the Internet occupies three petabytes (3 x 1000 terabytes) at this time. 

It is thought that one human brain may store roughly one petabyte. Though there may be some similarity in storage capacity between the quantity of information on the Internet and information stored in the human brain, quantity is the main point of similarity, since the information is stored and processed in totally different ways by people and computers.

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, "Guest Column: Computers vs. Brains," New York Times Blogs, 03-31-2009.

According to the New York Times, the government of Australia said that it

"would create a publicly owned company to build a national high- speed broadband network, spending 43 billion Australian dollars in one of the largest state-sponsored Internet infrastructure upgrades in the world. 

"Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the eight-year, $31 billion project would create up to 37,000 jobs at the peak of construction, giving a lift to the economy as retail spending slumps and mining companies cut workers amid weakening demand for Australian metals. The plan is 'the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government,' Mr. Rudd told reporters.

"The government’s announcement was a surprise rebuff to five private telecommunications firms, including Optus of Singapore and Axia NetMedia of Canada, that had been bidding to build a slower, less expensive network, with fiber-optic cables reaching as far as local nodes, worth around 10 billion dollars.

"But Mr. Rudd scrapped those proposals in favor of a superior but more expensive network that will deliver broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits per second — fast enough to download multiple movies simultaneously — to 90 percent of Australian buildings through fiber-optic cables that extend directly to the premises. The remaining 10 percent will receive upgraded wireless access."

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China  issues a directive that, as of July 1, 2009, Green Dam Youth Escort (simplified Chinese: 绿坝-花季护航) must be pre-installed on, or shipped on a compact disc with, all personal computers sold in the mainland of the People's Republic of China, including those imported from abroad.

Using the Golden Shield Project, sometimes called the "Great Firewall of China," China regularly restricts access to certain Internet sites and information that the government deems sensitive.

"Critics fear this new software could be used by the government to enhance internet censorship. The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the development was 'very unfortunate'. Ed Black, CCIA president criticised the move as 'clearly an escalation of attempts to limit access and the freedom of the internet, [...with] economic and trade as well as cultural and social ramifications.' Black said the Chinese were attempting to 'not only control their own citizens' access to the internet but to force everybody into being complicit and participate in a level of censorship'.

"On 8 June, Microsoft said that appropriate parental control tools was 'an important societal consideration'. However, 'we agree with others in industry and around the world that important issues such as freedom of expression, privacy, system reliability and security need to be properly addressed.'

"A spokesman for the Foreign ministry said the software would filter out pornography or violence. "The Chinese government pushes forward the healthy development of the internet. But it lawfully manages the internet," he added.

"On 11 June, a BBC News article reported that potential faults in the software could lead to a large-scale disaster: The report included comments by Isaac Mao, who said that there were 'a series of software flaws', including the unencrypted communications between the software and the company's servers, which could allow hackers access to people's private data or place malicious script on machines on the network to "affect [a] large scale disaster' " (Wikipedia article on Green Dam Youth Escort, accessed 06-11-2009).

At the Google IO Developers Conference in San Francisco Google demonstrates Google Wave, "an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent email and Internet communication in general" developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed Google Maps.  The opensource program will be available to developers worldwide.

The Google Wave demonstration is available on a 1.5 hour video available on YouTube. When I accessed the video on June 1, 2009 it had already been downloaded 1,173,600 times and had already received 3,225 ratings.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), netarchive. org publishes the WARC file format as an international standard: ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation—WARC file format.

"For many years, heritage organizations have tried to find the most appropriate ways to collect and keep track of World Wide Web material using web-scale tools such as web crawlers. At the same time, these organizations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitized files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange. Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.

"The WARC format is expected to be a standard way to structure, manage and store billions of resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format , which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web. WARC format offers new possibilities, notably the recording of HTTP request headers, the recording of arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol" (http://netpreserve.org/press/pr20090601.php).

Solid Oak Software Inc, developer of CyberSitter, alleged that an Internet-filtering program called Green Dam Youth Escort produced in China and mandated by the Chinese government, contains stolen portions of the company's code.

"Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348705,00.asp, accessed 06-13-2009).

Solid Oak Software Inc. said it will try to stop PC makers from shipping computers with the software.

"Solid Oak said Friday that it found pieces of its CyberSitter filtering software in the Chinese program, including a list of terms to be blocked, instructions for updating the software, and an old news bulletin promoting CyberSitter. Researchers at the University of Michigan who have been studying the Chinese program also said they found components of CyberSitter, including the blacklist of terms.

"Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the Chinese company that made the filtering software, denied stealing anything. "That's impossible," said Bryan Zhang, Jinhui's founder, in response to Solid Oak's charges.

"The allegations come as PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are sorting through a mandate by the Chinese government requiring that all PCs sold in China as of July come with the filtering software. Representatives of the two big U.S. companies said they are working with trade associations to monitor new developments related to the Chinese software" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124486910756712249.html, accessed 06-13-2009).

According to Internetworldstats.com there were about 1,733,993,000 Internet users on September 30, 2009. This compared with about 360,985,000 on December 31, 2000.

Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network presenting the findings of the Internet Observatory Report at the North American Network Operators Group NANOG47 in Dearborn, Michigan.

"• The report is believed to be the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s. The report offers analysis of two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers.

"• At its peak, the study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second and a total of more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic over the two-year life of the study.

"• The Internet Observatory Report includes a discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; and a concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends.

Key Findings:

"• Evolution of the Internet Core: Over the last five years, Internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional Internet core of 10 to 12 Tier-1 international transit providers. Today, the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenter / CDNs and consumer networks. Consequently, most Tier-1 networks have evolved their business models away from IP wholesale transit to focus on broader cloud / enterprise services, content hosting and VPNs.

"• Rise of the ‘Hyper Giants’: Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world. Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – “hyper giants” like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

"• Applications Migrate to the Web: Historically, Internet applications communicated across a panoply of application specific protocols and communication stacks. Today, the majority of Internet application traffic has migrated to an increasingly small number of web and video protocols, including video over web and Adobe Flash. Other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years.

"• A New Internet Ecosystem: Over the last five years, macroeconomic forces have radically transformed the global Internet commercial ecosystem. Economic changes, including the collapse of wholesale IP transit and the dramatic growth in advertisement-supported service, reversed decade-old business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers. A wave of innovation is ongoing, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs. This change in the Internet business ecosystem has significant ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research."

According to the report by Arbor Networks' 2009 Atlas Observatory Report Google accounts for 6 percent of all Internet traffic of every type. 

"And how many would have heard of a company called Carpathia Hosting? Its MegaUpload, MeaErotik, MegaClick and MegaVideo services have turned it into a company that now accounts for 1 percent of all Internet traffic, says Arbor, and this will doubtless grow. The important takeaway is that few of these companies had even been heard of two years ago, and very few of them are big telcos. To put all this into perspective, in 2007 Arbor found that the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic was accounted for by 30,000 entities, with fifty percent of traffic accounted for by around 10,000 companies.

"Only two years later that same fifty percent now runs through only 150 top 'content delivery networks' (CDNs), an astonishing consolidation made more remarkable by the fact that Internet traffic has grown significantly during that time.

" 'Up to 2007, The Internet meant connecting to lots of servers and data centres around the world,' notes Arbor's chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. Now there are barely 100 companies that matter. Traffic patterns tend to be hidden, mainly because the companies losing out - the traditional telcos and ISPs - don't exactly have an interest in advertising their waning status. The reason for their decline in importance is that Internet traffic is being driven by huge providers with access to content such as video.

" 'For 150 years, they [BT and other telcos] have had the same business model. Now everyone is trying to get away from being a dumb pipe.' Arbor's Atlas Internet Observatory report crunched traffic from 100 of the Internet's largest entities, accounting for 12 Terabytes of peak throughput, equivalent to about a quarter of the Internet's total at any one moment, said Labovitz.The importance of this is not simply that a small number of companies will account for a lot of traffic, but that these companies are increasingly what the Internet actually is. The Internet up to around 2007 was dominated by a hierarchy of companies, co-operating with one another to allow traffic to be passed from one to the other, regardless of size. The new Internet superpowers, in stark contrast, bypass a lot of this and use direct connections from one to the other. If a company is not part of this new core, it could find itself increasingly passed to the 'long tail', a polite way of saying they will be shoved to the fringe.  

Video, including video that runs over web/http, now accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic, and is one reason all these direct connections between large data centres are now necessary. IPv6 traffic remains tiny at only 0.03 percent of traffic, but is showing sudden and possibly rapid growth in recent months thanks to deployments by named hosters.  

"Interestingly, P2P is in rapid decline, falling from around 3 percent of all traffic in 2007 to only half a percent now. Again, downloaders appear to prefer direct connectivity for downloads, mostly through port 80 and the web" (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/14/internet-now-dominated-traffic-superpowers)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) votes to allow Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets.

"The decision is a 'historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,' said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive. 'We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.' 

"This change affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, Icann’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.  

"Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with 'country codes,' the designators at the end of an address name, like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, Icann said.

"Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge.  'I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,' Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. 'Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.'  

"The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for Icann to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names Nov. 16. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand for the new 'internationalized' domain name system has been among the strongest, Icann officials say. Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said.  

"This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/technology/31net.html?hp)

"First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.  

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web. . .

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. For example, in the screen shot, the big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under "News results." Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the 'Latest results' feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.

Click on 'Latest results' or select 'Latest' from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only 'Updates' from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.  

And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added 'hot topics' to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.  

"Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

"Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

"First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.  

"Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

"Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers. //We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this Report to Congress (PDF) by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see p. 163-), as well as a related analysis (PDF) prepared for the Commission, Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.  "We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.  

"We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that 'we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.'

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

"Exploit code for the zero-day hole in Internet Explorer linked to the China-based attacks on Google and other companies has been released on the Internet, Microsoft and McAfee warned on Friday.

"Meanwhile, the German federal security agency issued a statement on Friday urging its citizens to use an alternative browser to IE until a patch arrives.  

" 'We still only see limited targeted attacks affecting Internet Explorer 6,' Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager lead at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a statement. 'While newer versions of Internet Explorer are affected by this vulnerability, mitigations exist that make exploitation much more difficult.'

"McAfee researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed that it has been published on at least one Web site, the company's Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz wrote in his blog. 'The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week,' he said.

" 'The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability,' Kurtz wrote. 'The now-public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit.' Microsoft issued a warning on Thursday about the new hole and said it was working on a patch. The vulnerability affects IE 6, 7 and 8 on all the modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, according to Microsoft's advisory. Microsoft said IE 6 was the browser version being used on the computers that were targeted in the attacks. Google disclosed the attacks targeting it and other U.S. companies on Tuesday and said the attacks originated in China. Human rights activists who use Gmail also were targeted, Google said.

"The company said it discovered the attacks in mid-December and while it did not specifically implicate the Chinese government, it says that as a result of the incidents, it may withdraw from doing business in China. Sources familiar with the attack code say the attacks are similar to previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were linked to the Chinese government or proxies operating for the government. Source code was stolen from some of the more than 30 Silicon Valley companies targeted in the attack, sources said. Adobe has confirmed that it was targeted by an attack, and sources have said Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical also were targets.

"McAfee says references in the IE-related attack code it analyzed indicate that the attackers called the operation 'Aurora' and that the attack was extremely sophisticated" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10436083-245.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

On the sixth anniversary of the founding of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announces that it has 400,000,000 users:

"Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.  

"Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.  

"For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises. 

"Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.  

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.  

"After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you" (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=287542162130, accessed 02-10-2010).

Google announced in its blog that it stopped censoring search services on Google.cn, and moved its Chinese search business from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.

"Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, accessed 03-22-2010)

Twitter announces in its blog that it will donate its archive of 10,000,000,000 text messages (tweets) accumulated since the founding of the company in October 2006:

"The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library's primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

"Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.  

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.  

"Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber's latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!"

"Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.  

"Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories on Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.

"Registrations for websites to use those names are to begin soon. On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix" (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_EGYPT_ARAB_DOMAIN_NAMES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT, accessed 05-16-2010).

According to The New York Times, people are now using their cell phones more for text messaging and data-processing than for speech. This should not come as a surprise to anyone with teen-age children.

". . . although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.  

"This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.  

"Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.  

"The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say. 'Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,' said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. 'But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.'  

"Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. 'Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,' said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.  

"But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html?hp, accessed 05-14-2010).

"The volume of data on the world’s mobile networks is doubling each year, according to Cisco Systems, the U.S. maker of routers and networking equipment. By 2014, it estimates, the monthly data flow will increase about sixteenfold, to 3.6 billion gigabytes from 220.1 million" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02iht-NETPIPE02.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/business/global/index.jsonp, accessed 08-01-2010)