The birthday is one of many that could have been picked – the name “internet” is only 35 years old, for instance, while the first email was sent 45 years ago.
But Arpanet, the defence computer network that grew accidentally into the all-encompassing, era-defining, economy-changing, amusing-pictures-of-cats-facilitating behemoth that is today’s internet, seems as good a place to start as any.
We know, incidentally, that we have overlooked something fairly major – the role of pornography in driving the internet’s growth. That isn’t out of prudery, it’s just that we couldn’t find a suitable “defining moment”.
That probably indicates that it’s just been there, all the time, since the beginning. Well, maybe not on the Difference Engine.
1. The Difference Engine, 1822
Charles Babbage, a splendidly eccentric 19th-century mathematician and inventor, is generally credited with designing the first programmable computer.
His Difference Engine was intended to carry out complicated equations mechanically, avoiding the need for error-prone human “computers”. He proposed the design in 1822, but despite significant funding from the British Government, it was not completed until the London Science Museum made one to his specifications in 1991.
His assistant, Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, has been hailed as the first programmer. A gifted mathematician, she wrote the algorithms that would have been processed by the engine had it ever been made, and may have seen uses for the computer that Babbage never did.
2. Vannevar Bush describes the Memex, 1945
In his essay As We May Think, the American engineer Vannevar Bush laid down some of the principles that underpin the modern internet. It suggested a large desk containing microfilm documents, which could be navigated through via keystrokes, not unlike modern hypertext.
Bush thought of this as a library that mimicked the form of human thought – using keywords to follow a chain of thought from document to document, without reference to a central authority.
It has been argued that he predicted Wikipedia - "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
3. The first email, 1965
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seem to have been among the first to communicate via computer.
Only users on the same mainframe could type messages to each other – messages between computers were not developed for some years.
4. The word ‘hypertext’ is coined, 1965
Ted Nelson first used the word “hyper-text”, as seen in a contemporary student newspaper report on a lecture he gave. He envisaged a 'docuverse' in which all documents were linked to other documents and navigated via links.
Nothing would ever be deleted and copyright problems would disappear as copying would be replaced by referrals. His attempt to build the docuverse, called Xanadu, was an earlier version of the work done by Tim Berners-Lee at Cern.
5. The On-Line System, 1968
Is this the moment computing started to take its modern form? Douglas Engelbart's demonstration of computer communication included the first mouse, the first multiple “windows” like today’s operating systems, and the first practical use of hypertext.
It also allowed users in several places to edit the same document – an early forerunner of the modern wiki system.
As a bonus, viewers on a giant screen in Menlo Park, California, were able to see Engelbart’s work on a computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in San Francisco – the first video conference.
6. First message sent over Arpanet, 1969
This is the event, 40 years ago, that we are somewhat arbitrarily calling the Birth of the Internet.
Arpanet, a linked network of computers created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for the US Department of Defense, was one of the first networks to use “packet switching”, a system that allowed several machines to communicate over a single circuit, instead of having a dedicated link between two computers.
At 10:30pm on 29 October, this was demonstrated by sending a message from UCLA in Los Angeles to SRI in San Francisco. The message was meant to be “login”, but a system crash after two letters meant that it was, in fact, “lo”. The full five-letter message was successfully sent an hour or so later.
7. First email over Arpanet, 1971
There is some debate over this – it is suggested that in fact email was first sent within a few weeks of Arpanet’s development in 1969. However, the first message is widely credited to Ray Tomlinson.
Tomlinson’s was also the first message to use an @ symbol to distinguish between the name of the user and the name of the machine.
8. The name Internet, 1974
By this time Arpanet was not the only packet-switching system – it was also being used by the (British) Post Office, as well as commercial outfits like Telenet, Datapac and Transpac.
The first suggestion that they could all be brought together into a single, global network was made by Stanford University researchers Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, in a December 1974 paper, which coined the term “internet”.
It wasn’t until 1978 that the system, known in the UK as the International Packet Switched Service, came into service.
9. World Wide Web, 1989
The web is, in fact, not the internet. This may come as a surprise to many people. While the internet is the hardware, the computers and the phone lines that link them, the web is the software.
The web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the Cern laboratories in Geneva. It allows the network of documents, navigated via a browser, that we all know today.
The hypertext that had been hinted at by Vannevar Bush, named by Ted Nelson and used primitively by Douglas Engelbart became, in the hands of Mr Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the familiar highlighted words that users can simply click on and navigate their way around the web with.
10. Mosaic, the first popular browser, 1993
Before Chrome, before Opera, before Firefox and Safari, before even the widely loathed Internet Explorer 6, before – if you can believe it – the venerable Netscape, there was Mosaic.
There had been earlier browsers – Berners-Lee’s own WorldWideWeb, for instance, or Erwise, or ViolaWWW – but Mosaic is the one credited with bringing the internet into the public sphere.
Mosaic 1.0 was released in April, with 2.0 following in December. However, its dominance was brief – the first open-source, free-to-use browser, Netscape Navigator, was released the following year, and it soon became the market leader.
Netscape itself died after Microsoft started targeting the web, releasing Internet Explorer v1.0 in 1995. It remains the dominant web browser, with 65 per cent of all usage, although that has dropped from a 2003 high of over 85 per cent.
11. DOOM, 1993
Not only one of the greatest and scariest games ever made, DOOM was arguably the internet’s first killer app. id Software’s bloody and brilliant (and hugely controversial) “first person shooter” was released via shareware over the internet – meaning that the first seven of the game’s 28 levels could be downloaded for free.
It is estimated that those seven levels were installed on more than 10 million computers within two years. As well as being the first must-have game that could be downloaded from the internet, it was a fantastic advert for what networked gaming could be.
It could be played by up to four people via a local area network or a modem, and introduced the term “deathmatch” into the language.
12. Electronic Telegraph, 1994
Without the slightest doubt, the single most important development in the history of the internet.
Ahem.
The Telegraph went online in November 1994, described as the Electronic Telegraph. At first it only carried the main stories from the day’s paper, but as it has developed it has gone on to carry much more – including picture galleries, online video, and, of course, comprehensive lists about the history of the internet.
13. Amazon and eBay, 1995 and 1996
Nowadays, we buy things over the internet all the time, spending anything from a few quid on the weekly groceries to thousands on a new car or computer. But while it wasn’t unheard of before the launch of Amazon.com in 1995, it was distinctly niche.
Amazon changed all that. Originally a bookshop, it has expanded to sell computer games, videos, music, clothes, food, toys, furniture and more. eBay, launched the following year, pioneered the peer-to-peer model of allowing web users to buy and sell from each other.
Amazon in particular paved the way for the dotcom boom of the next few years; its business model did not expect to show a profit for the first four to five years, relying instead on investor backing. It was not until 2001 that the company made money, but now turns over more than $19 billion (£11.5 billion) a year, with profits of $645 million (£390 million).
eBay’s first sale, incidentally, was of a broken laser pointer, for $14.83. The buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers."
14. Wireless Application Protocol, 1997
The first, clunky, slow, borderline useless system for making the internet available on mobile phones.
It might have taken half an hour to get cinema listings or football results via its creaking servers, but it paved the way for the iPhone and the Google Android. Now, with Wikipedia (item 17) available over our mobiles, we hardly need to actually know anything any more – we can just look it up.
Unless we’re on the Tube, of course. Then we're on our own.
15. Google launched, 1998
There were search engines before Google, which became necessary after the list of all available web servers became impossibly long: Gopher, Veronica, the World Wide Web Wanderer, WebCrawler, Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, AltaVista.
But Google, as well as being groundbreaking in how it searched and how it ranked the results, was the first to enter the English language as a verb. In the same way as one hoovers, rather than vacuums, or uses a biro instead of a ballpoint pen, one tends to Google, rather than “run a web search”.
16. DotCom bubble bursts, 2000
The exciting new possibilities of web businesses began what was called the “internet gold rush”. From around 1998, investors fell over each other to throw money at any business with a .com at the end.
Unfortunately, not all of those .com suffixes followed a Google, Amazon or eBay. Altogether too many followed a Boo or an eToys.
The bubble reached its peak in March 2000, and promptly burst. $5 trillion was wiped off the value of technology firms in the following 18 months.
17. Wikipedia launched, 2001
According to its Wikipedia page, “Wikipedia (WI-ki-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
“Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 13 million articles (three million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.
“Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.”
It has been accused of bias (the thinking behind its unintentionally hilarious counterpart “Conservapedia”), dismissed for being too weighted towards pop culture, and criticised for inaccuracy. It is famously vulnerable to vandalism.
However, it was found by the journal Nature to “[come] close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries”, and has transformed the way we find things out. Don’t know something? Look it up on Wikipedia. It might not be 100 per cent reliable, but it is at your fingertips.
18. LOLcats, 2005
We could have picked any one of a thousand memes here – All Your Base Are Belong To Us, if we were feeling nostalgic, or FAILblog.org if we wanted to see people fall off things. But we’ve picked LOLcats.
The power of the internet to distract from work is breathtaking, whether via Twitter, Facebook, or other (the author, for what it’s worth, frequently wastes time at twitter.com/tomchivers). For the last four years, one of its favourite sources for amusing round-robin emails is pictures of cats in strange situations, with misspelt captions in a san serif font. Naturally.
19. China’s number of internet users overtakes Americans, 2008
In December last year, stats suggested that the number of people who had logged on to the internet that month had risen above one billion for the first time, according to Comscore, a company that tracks internet usage.
Pretty amazing – and in fact, that number might be even greater, as the survey didn’t include the under-15s or people using public computers. Estimates rise as high as 1.6 billion now.
But equally significantly, the number of those users who were Chinese overtook the number who were American for the first time – 178 million to 163 million.
The news that internet addresses could be written in non-Latin alphabets also points to a future where English is not the automatic lingua franca of the web.
20. Cloud computing goes mainstream, 2009
The future of the internet and computing in general?
The idea of dispersed storage of files has been around for a while – Hotmail could store your documents way back in 2000 – but true cloud computing, which takes the actual processing away from the grey box on your desk and does it in a formless ‘cloud’ of web connections, is pretty new.
That said, a sort of mirror image of it has been going on for years. Seti@home and Folding@home both use the computing power of millions of home processors – in computers and game consoles, respectively – to power major computer systems; Seti in the search for extraterrestrial life, Folding in medical research.
But this is the other way around – there will be no home computers. Instead, huge servers scattered around the web will carry out all the processing functions. Your computer will essentially be a screen, a mouse and a keyboard, plugged into the web. Software will not be bought, but paid for with your attention in the form of advertising.
What happens after that, we don't know.
-- Daily Telegraph