It’s Monday morning, so we’re figuring you’ll be glad of a time-wasting distraction or amusement, so the more techie minded among you might appreciate mulling over the the relatively brief but eventful history of the Internet.
The illustrated page takes you through the key milestones and events related to the growth and evolution of the Internet, from its humble spoddy beginnings in 1969 to today’s mass adoption.
The site tells us that the first email was sent in 1975 and the first bulletin board system (BBS) was developed in 1978, the same year that spam was born.
MUD games (short for MultiUser Dungeon) surfaced in 1979, offering text-based virtual worlds which combined elements of role-playing games, interactive, fiction, and online chat, with Usenet also starting up the same year.
The first emoticon was born in 1982 and by 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the Internet. Two years later AOL was born, and Tim Berners-Lee also unveiled his proposal for the World Wide Web.
The first web page was created in 1991, followed by the first webcam installed at Cambridge University computer lab, letting lab users monitor the coffee pot.
Mosaic, the first browser appeared in 1993, with rival Netscape Navigator following a year later. Google appeared five years later in 1998, with the dotcom crash of 2000 sending sales of expensive office chairs plummeting.
Wikipedia was launched in 2001, followed by MySpace in 2003 and the first version of Facebook a year later.
So when did you get online?
We’re almost veterans of the web, first getting online back in 1993, running Mosaic on our Amiga A1200 in-between marathon sessions of Frontier.
Our sister site urban75 was born two years later, making it one of the longest running independent web ‘zines around, and we’ve been stuck to the Internet ever since.
So when did you first get online? Are you an old hand or a relative newbie?
Just after you. Mosaic on a college lab computer (486 I think), late 1994.
First got my own internet access in 1992 through Demon, though I’d been using email of one kind or another since starting college in 1985.
I remember visiting an internet cafe near Exeter Central rail station during an excursion to the big city (as I knew Exeter then!), some time in 1995.
I didn’t really make any sense or use of the internet proper until 1997 though, when I left my internet-less secondary school for a 6th form college that had a load of computers online that you could use any time of the day.
Totally mind blowing.