Googlopoly

We all know the expression “you cannot know where you are going if you don’t know where you are coming from”. To foresee the future of the internet it is important (and interesting) to look at its history. Here are some highlights of the major occurrences over history that has shaped the Internet of today.

1965: First Network Experiment: Directed by Larry Roberts at MIT Lincoln Lab, two computers talked to each other using packet-switching technology.

1966: The first ARPANET project begins. Small university networks are beginning to be developed.

1968: The first computer mouse is introduced.

1969: The first ARPANET message sent: “lo.” Trying to spell log-in, but the system crashed.

1972: First basic e-mail programs for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL. “@” sign chosen, meaning “at”

1973: ARPANET goes global

1976: Queen Elizabeth sends out her first email message. Apple Computer founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

1981: IBM announces first Personal Computer. Microsoft creates DOS.

1983: ‘.com’, ‘.edu’, ‘.gov’, ‘.org’, ‘.net’ and ‘.int’ created

1984: William Gibson coins the term ‘cyberspace’. Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh on January 24th.

1985: The first registered domain is Symbolics.com.

1988: First large-scale Internet worm affects thousands of Internet hosts.

1990: APRANET ends.

1991: Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web.

1992: “Surfing the Internet” is coined by jean Armour Polly.

1993: Web grows by 341,000 percent in one year.

1994: ARPANET celebrates 25th anniversary. Java’s first public demonstration.

1995: Sun Microsystems releases Java. Windows 95 released

1996: Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for $15,000

1997: business.com sold for $150,000

2000: 20, 000, 000 websites on the Internet.

2003: The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading attacks ever, taking 10 minutes to spread worldwide.

The Research project “How much information 2003: finds that e-mail generates 4000,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.

2005: YouTube.com launches

2006: An estimated 92 million websites online.

2007: Apple surpasses 1 billion iTunes downloads. Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as “the most valuable global brand: and also is the most visited website.

Sweden is currently the country with the highest percentage of net users, with 75%. The Internet continues to experience incredible growth. More people use the Internet to get connected to others, find information, do business, and share information than ever before in history. An interesting survey showed what the experts thought of the future of the internet. The Pew Internet/Elon University survey was conducted online by experts and active members of several key technology groups. Among them were The Internet Society, The World Wide Web Consortium, The Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, ICANN, Internet2 and the Association of Internet Researchers. These experts were asked to give their predictions about technology in the year 2020. What they predicted was that the cell phone will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people; voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more widespread and accepted; and the gap between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be closed even more for everyone who is connected. Approximately 1,114 billion people use the internet today and this number is growing. The Internet is expanding and developing at such a fast rate, who knows where we are heading towards.

A side order of fun facts:

- The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968.

- Backrub was the original name for Google. The name Google is a twist on the word

Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Thanks to these websites for their great history timelines of the Internet:

http://websearch.about.com/od/whatistheinternet/a/historyinternet.htm

http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/timeline.asp