After a lot of brainstorming (for ideas), a friend of mine ran into me and started talking. While he was talking, he also told me how Yahoo was intuit ally called Jerry Guide To The Web which as a matter of fact, I didn't know (I'm just 13, what did you expect ?).<p>Now, it struck me that we need a concise and beautiful website to tell you about the history of the web, only the important things, no need for little stuff, as long text will make people go TL;DR(they won't find it interesting enough to read the whole thing).<p>So, can you guys help me with the history of the internet ? Just give me a short list of the events you think are important and need to make it to the website. Post stuff in the form of "YYYY - EVENT" and maybe a little about it.<p>EDIT: Here's my list:<p>1. 1945 - Vannevar Bush predicts a system like the Web<p>2. 1989 - The Internet is born<p>3. 1991 - The Internet is released to the public<p>4. 1993 - Mosaic Browser released<p>5. 1994 - Yahoo is founded by Jerry Yang as "Jerry's guide to the World Wide Web"<p>6. 1998 - Google, the largest website on the internet, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin<p>7. 2004 - Facebook, The Social Network is made by Mark Zuckerberg.<p>(More Coming)
You might find the slides to a keynote I gave interesting as I basically did a slide by slide "year - event" type thing: <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/peterc/i-choo-choo-choose-the-web-a-history-of-the-web-and-javascript-1945-2012" rel="nofollow">https://speakerdeck.com/peterc/i-choo-choo-choose-the-web-a-...</a><p>To pick some though:<p>1945 - Vannevar Bush publishes As We May Think, predicting a system like the Web<p>1965 - Term "hypertext" coined and Douglas Englebart demonstrates the "online system"<p>1983 - ARPANET moves to TCP/IP, the "Internet" is born<p>1983-84 - DNS is invented and deployed across the Internet<p>1985 - Generic top level domains introduced (.com, .net, etc)<p>1991 - The Web becomes publicly available<p>1992 - ViolaWWW Web browser released, and first Web server outside of Europe<p>... actually, just check out the slides as I'm repeating them ;-)
My boss is Tony Johnson. He helped with SLAC's first website (first website in the US, and also the first database driven website) and wrote MidasWWW. Among other things, he mentioned going to the first web conference (where he met everyone TBL, Marc Andreesen, etc...), attended by only 25 or so people, where they wrote out how HTML forms would work on a board. There's lots of information online about SLACs history in the web and some sparse information otherwise, but he'd be happy to answer questions about the early web too. You can also read through the WWW mailing lists, but I think some of what is there is incomplete.
In terms of milestone events, you might look into things like the first viruses, the birth of e-commerce and the development of SSL, social media pre-Facebook, the first DotCom implosion, the advent of "Web 2.0," etc. (though precise dates for these may be debatable).<p>Unfortunately I'm coming up empty when trying to remember more positive developments that had a broader impact and aren't narrowly commercial, and it may be that the nature of these is a more gradual process (and part of why we hear about "good news" less frequently).
It only goes back to 2009, but this could be used as a starting point I guess? <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.alexa.com/topsites" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.alexa.com/topsites</a>
Of course the Wayback Machine could be used to find what websites used to look like in a certain time period as well.
Neat repo to plot these dates on a timeline. <a href="https://github.com/cheeaun/life" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cheeaun/life</a>