How the web spread worldwide: A chronology

On September 2, 1969, even as the world was celebrating man’s footprints on the moon, another “giant leap for mankind” was taking shape in a small lab inside the University of California — the Internet was being born.

1969: Two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange data in the first test of Internet. The first connection between two sites—UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in California—takes place on October 29. The network crashes after the first two letters of the word ”logon”.

1972: Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network, choosing “at” symbol as way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

1983: Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as “.com,” “.gov” and “.edu” comes a year later.

1988: One of the first Internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

1994: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois develop the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft Corp.

1998: Google Inc. is born out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. Microsoft is sued for abusing its market power to thwart competition.

1999: Napster popularises music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. World Internet population surpasses 250 million.

2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites crippled in first widespread use of the denial-of-service attack.

2009: World Internet users surpass 1.5 billion. China’s Internet population reaches 250 million.

2013: India will be world’s third-largest online population (around 90 mn) and China will be higher over 350 mn.