Nine times out of ten, my “alone time” is in the car, usually with the radio dial set to National Public Radio. On the weekends in particular, I enjoy everything from Weekend Edition to Radio Lab to … well, of course, the quiz shows. And while I have to begrudgingly acknowledge that NPR has a definitive bias, I still expect their reporting to be based on facts. This is why when Peter Sagal and Paula Poundstone declared the Internet to be 25 years old I wanted to dial the NPR editor’s desk because, you see, I know that it is the World Wide Web that is celebrating its 25th birthday, and not the Internet.
Of course, I recognize that I listen to Sagal and Poundstone more than they listen to me (I wrote on the Web at 25 subject last week), but it strikes me that they could have gotten it right had they simply read the press briefing. So in service to the accuracy of it all, I offer this helpful timeline:
1969: 45 years ago ARPANET connected its first two nodes. They did not use TCP/IP, and it was not open to the public. However, those two nodes did comprise an Inter-network, so it counts.
1974: 40 years ago RFC 675 first uses the term “Internet.”
1982: 32 years ago TCP/IP was adopted and standardized.
1986: 28 years ago the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was formed to manage interoperability.
1989: 25 years ago Tim Berners-Lee proposes Hypertexting on the Internet, to create a “Web” of information.
1994: 20 years ago W3C becomes the standard body for the Web and HTML.
1995: 19 years ago the Internet becomes fully commercial and supports consumers.
1996: 18 years ago the “First” cellular phone with Internet Access (Nokia’s Communicator) is released.
1998: 16 years ago ICANN was formed to manage the Internet’s Identifiers.
Naturally, there are many in-between steps and a multitude of other names that deserve inclusion in this timeline, and you should feel free to link and expand. One important caveat, though, is that I gathered all of this information from Wikipedia and thus it is subject to suspicion. With such exceptions as Jon Postel though, many of the pioneers in the space still exist and are (at least somewhat) approachable. As such, if you want to verify history as it applies to the Internet, there is still time to talk to those who actually created that history.
All of these markings in time have brought us to where we are today. Unfortunately there are lots of people propagating lots of bad information. If you want to be part of the solution to that, though, feel free to use Snopes.com to help dispel rumors (e.g., Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet) and participate and/or contribute to help Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia to keep the history correct.
We are all living the amazing history of the Internet Age, and we should hold this incredible tool in the same sense of awe that people had when they were first coming to grips with Edison’s light bulbs.
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