1969: On Sept. 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites takes place on Oct. 29, though 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. 1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway. 1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true Internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on Jan. 1, 1983. 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 remotely at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. 1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first Web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page, opening the Web to the world with software that is easy to use. 1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft Corp. and other developers who would tap the Web's commerce potential. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services. 1995: Amazon.com Inc. opens its virtual doors. 1998: Google Inc. forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. 1999: Napster popularizes 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 as technology companies slide. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites are crippled in one of the first widespread uses of the denial-of-service attack, which floods a site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit. 2002: World Internet population surpasses 500 million. 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University. 2005: Launch of YouTube video-sharing site. 2006: World Internet population surpasses 1 billion. 2007: Apple Inc. releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless Internet access. 2008: World Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. 2009: Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the Web. __
