World Wide Web Timeline

“>”You’ve got mail!”

1990

• 42% of American adults have used a computer.
• World’s first website and server go live at CERN, running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which bears the message “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!”
• Tim Berners-Lee develops the first Web browser WorldWideWeb.
• Archie, the first tool to search the internet is developed by McGill University student Alan Emtage.

1991

• Researchers rig up a live shot of a coffee pot so they could tell from their computer screens when a fresh pot had been brewed. Later connected to the World Wide Web, it becomes the first webcam.

1992

• The term “surfing the internet” is coined and popularized.

• 

  Tim Berners-Lee posts the first photo, of the band “Les Horribles Cernettes,” on the Web.

• The line-mode browser launches. It is the first readily accessible browser for the World Wide Web.

1993

• CERN places its World Wide Web technology in the public domain, donating it to the world.
• The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) releases Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to become popular with the general public. “The web as we know it begins to flourish,” Wired later writes.
• The New York Times writes about the Web browser Mosaic and the World Wide Web for the first time. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.”
• Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG HTML tag to allow the display of images on the Web.

1994

• 11 million American households are “equipped to ride the information superhighway.”
• One of the first known Web purchases takes place: a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese from Pizza Hut.
• President Bill Clinton’s White House comes online.
• Yahoo! is created by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally named the site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
• The first banner ad for hotwired.com appears, with the text “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? —> YOU WILL.”
• Two lawyers post the first massive, commercial spam message with the subject “Green Card Lottery -Final One?”

1995

• 18 million American homes are now online, but only 3% of online users have ever signed on to the World Wide Web.
• Amazon.com opens for business, billing itself as the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.”
• Craig Newmark starts craigslist, originally an email list of San Francisco events.
• Match.com, the first online dating site, launches.
• Entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launches eBay, originally named “AuctionWeb.” He lists the first item for sale: a broken laser pointer. A collector purchases it for $14.83.
• Chris Lamprecht becomes the first person to be banned from the internet by judicial decree. “I told the judge computers were my life,” Lamprecht later recalled.
• Netscape IPO starts the gold rush mentality for Web startups.
• Microsoft releases Windows 95 and the first version of Internet Explorer.
• Web hosting service GeoCities launches.

1996

• 77% of online users send or receive e-mail at least once every few weeks, up from 65% in 1995.
• Nokia releases the Nokia 9000 Communicator, the first cellphone with internet capabilities.
• HoTMaiL launches as one of the world’s first Webmail services, its name a reference to the HTML internet language used to build webpages.
• The Dancing Baby, a 3D animation, becomes one of the first viral videos.

1997

• Millions “visit Mars – on the internet” – the Jet Propulsion Lab allows people to watch the Sojourner rover landing and exploration of Mars. The broadcast generates about 40 million to 45 million hits each day.
• Netflix launches as a company that sends DVDs to homes via mail.
• Go Daddy launches as Jomax Technologies.
• Google.com registers as a domain.
• Jorn Barger becomes the first person to use the term “Weblog” to describe the list of links on his website.

1998

• 20% of Americans get news from the internet at least once a week, up from 4% in 1995.
• AOL launches AOL 4.0 and inundates American homes with CD-ROM mailers. AOL membership jumps from 8 million to 16 million members.
• The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes over responsibility for the coordination of the global internet’s systems of unique identifiers.
• Oxford Dictionary adds “spam” and “digerati.”

1999

• Pew Research Center tests online polling with mixed results.
• 41% of adults are using the internet and the weather is the most popular online news attraction.
• MP3 downloading service Napster launches, overloading high-speed networks in college dormitories. Many colleges ban the service and it is later shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files.
• Yahoo! acquires GeoCities for $3.6 billion.

2000

• 43% of internet users say they would miss going online “a lot,” up from 32% in 1995.
• 78% of internet users who download music don’t think it’s stealing to save music files to their computer hard drives.

• 40 million Americans – or 48% of internet users – have purchased a product online.

• 32% of internet users (over 30 million people) sent e-greeting cards to loved ones and friends.

• 

  The NASDAQ hits a record high of 5,048, before plunging by 78% during the dot com bust. A 2001 survey finds 71% of Americans who had heard about the dot com troubles believe a major cause of the dot-com woes is that investors were eager to make a lot of money and took at lot of risks.

• AOL acquires Time Warner for $165 billion. New York Times says “it could be the internet companies that do the buying and the old media that sell out.”

2001

• Only 3% of internet users say they got most of their information about the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath from the internet.

• The average internet user spends 83 minutes online.

• Jimmy Wales launches Wikipedia. Users write over 20,000 encyclopedia entries in the first year.

2002

• 55 million people now go online from work and 44% of those who have internet access at work say their use of the internet helps them do their jobs.

• 

  Social networking site Friendster.com launches, but is quickly overtaken by Facebook.

• Microsoft launches Xbox Live, its online multiplayer gaming service.”Critics scoffed at the idea, noting how uncommon broadband connections were at the time.”

2003

• 

  Apple launches the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at 99¢ each. The store sells one million songs in its first week.

• Skype, a voice-over-IP calling and instant messaging service, launches and quickly becomes a verb, as in “Skype me.”
• Professional networking site LinkedIn launches.
• MySpace.com is founded and quickly adopted by musicians seeking to share music and build their fan bases.
• President George W. Bush signs the CAN-SPAM Act into law, establishing the first national standards for the sending of commercial email.
• WordPress blog publishing system created.

2004

• 11% of American internet users follow the returns on election night online. One-in-ten internet users sign up for political email newsletters and news alerts during the campaign.
• Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launches thefacebook.com. 1,200 Harvard students sign up within the first 24 hours. Facebook goes on to become the world’s biggest social networking site, with over a billion users worldwide.
• Google starts trading on the NASDAQ at $85 a share.
• Social news website Digg launches. Digg users vote to “digg up” links that they like and “bury” down those they don’t.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0.
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG) World of Warcraft launches.

2005

• 8% of adult American internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online.
• 9% of internet users (13 million Americans) went online to donate money to the victims of Gulf Coast hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

• About one-in-six online adults – 25 million people – have sold something online.

• Broadband connections surpass dial-up connections.
• Community news site Reddit is founded. It is bought by Conde Nast a year later for $20 million.
• Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. buys MySpace for $580 million and sells it in 2011 for $35 million.
• YouTube is founded on Valentine’s Day. The