1957- The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.
1962- RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control over nuclear arms for a counter-attack.
1968- ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50Kbps circuits.
1969 – The first node is connected to the internet’s military ancestor, ARPANET. With no HQ and the ability to bounce messages between surviving nodes until they reach their destination, ARPANET was intended to be America’s bomb-proof communications network at the height of the Cold War.
1971 – Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg to make copyright-free works electronically available. The first is the US declaration of independence.
1972- The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.
1973- Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.
1976 – The Queen sends an email from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.
1982 – Scott Fahlman kick-starts smiley-culture by suggesting using the 
and 
smileys to convey emotions in emails. His message has been preserved at http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html.
1984 – Joint Academic Network (JANET) built to connect UK universities to each other over the internet.
1986 – Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams at the Center for Seismic Studies releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using internet-standard TCP/IP connections. His software builds on work begun in 1979 at Duke University to exchange information between Unix machines.
1988 - The first internet worm is unleashed by Robert Morris. It infects about 6000 computers. Although it causes no physical damage, it clogs up the internet and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer time.
1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invent the World Wide Web to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.
1993 - Marc Andreesen of the National Center for SuperComputer Applications in the US launches web-browser Mosaic. It introduces proprietary HTML tags and more sophisticated image capabilities. The browser is a massive success and businesses start to notice the web’s potential. Andreesen goes on to develop the Netscape web browser.
1994 – Internet Magazine launches. It reports on London’s first cybercafe and reviews 100 websites. It’s billed as the ‘most extensive’ list of websites ever to appear in a magazine. A 28.8Kbps modem costs $399 (plus VAT).
1995 – Digital Equipment Corporation’s Research lab launches search engine Alta Vista, which it claims can store and index the HTML from every internet page. It also introduces the first multilingual search.
1995 – eBAY is launched to enable internet users to trade with each other.
1996 - The browser wars begin. Microsoft sees the internet as a threat and integrates Internet Explorer with Windows. Netscape and Microsoft go head-to-head, intensively developing and releasing upgrades to their browsers.
1996 - Macromedia Flash 1.0 launches to add interactive animation to webpages. Early adopters include Disney and MSN.
1998 - Google arrives. It pioneers a ranking system that uses links to assess a website’s popularity. Google’s simple design is soothing while existing search engines cram their pages with animated adverts.
1999 - Shawn Fanning launches Napster. The peer-to-peer software enables internet users to swap MP3 music files stored on their computers and to find each other through a central directory. Record labels are furious. By July 2001, they had effectively stopped Napster operating.
2000 – The dotcom bust. After several years of venture capitalists throwing money at proposals with ‘internet’ on the cover, it all starts unravelling as many of these businesses fail to find a market and other realise they don’t have a business plan.
2001 – US regulators approve the merger of AOL and Time Warner. Shareholders of relative upstart AOL own 55% of the new company. AOL started in 1985 and grew its modest internet connection business into one of the world’s biggest media companies.
2003 – Nearly half of us are connected: UK telecomms regulator Oftel reports that 47% of UK homes have internet access and 58% have a PC. Of those online, 15% use broadband and 92% are satisfied with their service.
2004 - As broadband becomes more popular, media companies start selling music and video online. Napster relaunches as a paid music download store. It’s up against iTunes, Apple’s download store for its trendy iPod portable music players.
1. ASCII White-the fastest computer in the world. Can do 12 trillion calculations per second. It is a “super computer” that takes up a lot of space.
2. Charles Babbage- an English scientists who is considered to be the “Father of the Computer”. He was a cow catcher before designing computers. He believed that to error was human therefore he had to create a machine that would not make mistakes like humans. He was the first to design a computer-type machine. He designed an analytical engine that was 15 feet tall but he never got the chance to build it.
3. Herman Hollerith- a former M.I.T. instructor. He designed electric machines that sped up the process of calculating and counting. He formed a company that would become the basis for I.B.M.
4. Colossus- a machine built by the British to break the inigma code during World War I. It was a deceiphering machine.
5. John Mauchley and Eckert- made a machine that could figure charts in minutes. They also created “eniac”which was the most complex machine of its time weighing 30 tons and measuring 100 feet long. Created their own company, Univac, and mass produced computers which sold commercially. Univac was used by CBS to predict the results of the presidential election. The machine proved to be correct.
6. John Von Neumann- a skilled man with a photographic memory. Provided the last key to developing a general purpose computer. He created a computer that had memory, input and output devices, and an internally held program.
7. IBM- early 1960’s. Made computers that were much smaller and compact.
8. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce- made a single integrated circut chip. It was much smaller and was the most powerful computer of its time.
9. Ted Hoff- created the microprocessor which was all the information was on one tiny chip. Developed the Intel company.
10. Douglas Engelbart- created the mouse and keyboard.
11. Xerox- introduced “alto” in 1973 which had a graphical interface, laser printer, mouse, and a keyboard. It cost $18,000 per machine.
12. Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak- built the “apple one” by using a build it yourself computer kit. Then a few years later they built the “apple two” and introduced the floppy disc drive. It was a personal computer with 4KB of memory storage. It had a command line interface. The program for the apple computer became known as Macintosh.
13. Bill Gates- president of a company called Microsoft. He stole the ideas from apple and copied them to create his own computer program called “Windows”. He became the richest man in the world.
14. Hard Drive Disk- a metal disk usually made from aluminum and coated with a metallic powder.
15. RAM- Random Access Memory is a set of specialized microchips which shuffle data into groups.
16. Application- a fancy program which uses GUI’s.
17. GUI- Graphical User Interface that allows you to easily give instructions to a program.
18. Operating System- a serious of programs and applications that together operate the hardware that is connected together in the computer. It also manages the use of memory that shuffles data through the processor to perform functions.
19. Input Device- is any hardware that is connected to the computer.
20. Bandwidth- the speed at which computers send and receive information.
21. The Web- a large body of information much like a library.
22. Email- (electronic mail) a method of communicating which uses the resources of the web. Messages are compressed into date packets and are sent using addresses.
23. Programs- large groups of bytes, or code. Programs tell the computer how to work to create the product you request.
24. CPU- Central Precessing Unit.
25. HTML- (hypertext markup language) programming language used to create documents for display on the World Wide Web.
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml
http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/
http://www.sean.co.uk/a/science/history_of_the_internet.shtm
