| 1969 | Internet born; Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency connects together computers from four universities |
| 1972 | Email created by computer scientist Ray Tomlinson |
| 1973 | TCP/IP protocols created, becomes the standard way for computers to communicate with one another |
| 1982 | The word "internet" is first used |
| 1984 | Domain name system established (.org; .com; .edu) |
| 1985 | Company that eventually becomes AOL is founded |
| 1988 | The worm virus hits roughly 10 percent of computers connected to the internet |
| 1989 | Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Switzerland creates hypertext, graphical interface system, the basis for the World Wide Web (Web) |
| 1991 | Gopher web browser invented by researchers at the University of Minnesota |
| 1993 | Mosaic, a substantial improvement over other systems, becomes the standard for navigating the Web |
| 1995 | Dial-up internet service introduced by CompuServe, American Online, and Prodigy |
| 1996 | Internet traffic in US hits 45 million |
| 1997 | NASA's Pathfinder images from Mars gets 46 million hits on one day |
| 1999 | Napster invented; file-sharing begins on widespread basis |
| 2000 | Internet bubble bursts; many internet-based companies fail |
| 2003 | Roughly 2.6 billion music files per month downloaded; Spam reaches 50 percent of all email traffic |
| 2004 | On-line spending for products and services reaches $117 billion annually |
| | First full-fledged use of the internet for campaign organizing and fund-raising by Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination |
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| 2005 | The blogosphere-Web logs-- reaches 53.4 million world-wide; most are used for posting photos and music, sharing daily diaries, distributing recipes, and other non-political things. |
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| Sources Infoplease at www.infoplease.com ; and "The Blogging Geyser," from Perseus Research at www.perseus.com/survey/news/releases (April 8, 2005). |
