| Oct. 4, 1957 | First satellite launched
| Launched by the Soviet Union, Sputnik 1 was designed with 5 specific goals in mind: achieve political and psychological dominance; collect measurements about the upper atmosphere of Earth; analyze how radio waves travel through the ionosphere; and test pressurized thermal systems. This event precipitated the Space Race between the USSR and the USA. |
| September, 1958 | First modem | One of the first practical modems was developed to transmit radar information for the U.S. military’s SAGE program. Commercial applications followed in 1959 when the device was made available commercially. |
| 1965 | First WAN | Evolving from previous developments in the US military and the SAGE program, the first public WAN went live in 1965. A computer in Massachusetts was connected to a computer in California through a long-distance telephone line, demonstrating that computers could communicate across a continent. It also demonstrated the inefficiencies of the extant telephone system to deliver reliable results. |
| 1969 | ARPANET | Considered by many the true birth of the Internet, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first operational packet-switching computer network and the foundational precursor to the modern internet. What this meant was that dedicated lines of communication, such as a continuously open telephone line, were no longer necessary. This led directly to the possibility of a global Internet, instant communication through email and instant messaging, a web-like system where data could take different paths if one route were unavailanble, and the foundations for developing the World Wide Web. |
| 1971 | First e-mail sent | Using ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet, the experiment proved it possible to send information over a wide area network between two computer systems. It was determined at this time that the famous “at” sign – @ – which meant “at the rate of” would be the perfect keyboard symbol to use. |
| 1973 | TCP/IP | Under the leadership of Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, this protocol became the very foundation of the modern Internet. |
| August, 1991 | First publicly accessible website | Sir Timothy Berners-Lee activated the very first web site on Dec. 20, 1990. It was made available to the public in August of 1991. It may be seen HERE however using a modern browser instead of the original line-mode browser of the day gives it a much more modern look and feel. A more accurate representation of its appearance is HERE. |
| February 4, 2004 | “Thefacebook” launched | Originally, Zuckerberg and his college roommates designed a project called “Facemash” where users were asked to vote on who was more attractive among a set of paired photographs which he had obtained from official Harvard sources without permission. This of course led to disciplinary action on the part of Harvard U., but “Thefacebook” launched successfully and quickly went viral, with over a million users by the end of the year. It was rebranded “Facebook” in August, 2005. |
| February 14, 2005 | First YouTube video posted | YouTube was originally conceived as a dating app called “Tune In Hook Up” where users would post videos of themselves describing their ideal partner. It failed as such since hardly anyone posted, and it was opened up to any type of video content. The first posting is preserved for history on Wikipedia HERE. |
| 2015 | 3 billion Internet users | Users of the Internet rose quickly from an estimated 2.6 million in 1990 to a staggering 3 billion in 2015. Today, users are estimated at 6 billion of a current estimated 8.3 billion. |
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