Internet
The network. Packet switching and ARPANET, TCP/IP, the Web and the browser wars, search, the dot-com boom and bust, broadband, and the protocols nobody sees.
Part of Technology
28 moments in this segment.
- - ARPANET First Connection. October 29, 1969. UCLA → Stanford. The first ARPANET message was supposed to be "LOGIN"; the system crashed after "LO." The internet's direct ancestor.
- - AOL Founded. May 24, 1985. Quantum Computer Services (renamed AOL in 1991) launches. By 2001, 30M paying subscribers. The "You've got mail" jingle defines the consumer internet onramp of the 1990s.
- - First Website Goes Live. August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee publishes info.cern.ch, the first website ever. Hosted on a NeXT machine in his CERN office. Still online in archived form 30+ years later.
- - Mosaic Browser. April 22, 1993. NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical web browser to display inline images. Within a year, the web is consumed by mainstream audiences. Marc Andreessen leaves NCSA to co-found Netscape.
- - Amazon Founded. July 5, 1994. Jeff Bezos founds Amazon in his Bellevue garage. First book sold: July 1995. By 2024: the world's largest e-commerce + cloud-computing company; Bezos the richest person on Earth for most of the previous decade.
- - AOL Free-Trial CDs. AOL's free-trial CDs that came in every magazine, every cereal box, every mailbox in the US 1993-2006. Estimated 1 billion CDs produced.
- - eBay Founded. September 3, 1995. Pierre Omidyar starts AuctionWeb (renamed eBay 1997). First item sold: a broken laser pointer for $14.83. The platform that proved the internet could host real commerce between strangers.
- - ICQ Released. November 15, 1996. Israeli company Mirabilis releases ICQ, first widely-used internet messenger. The "uh-oh" notification sound is one of the most-recognised audio cues of the late-1990s internet.
- - Hotmail Launches. July 4, 1996. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch Hotmail, first widely-used webmail. Acquired by Microsoft in December 1997 for $400M, the first 9-figure internet acquisition.
- - Google Founded. September 4, 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google. Andy Bechtolsheim writes a $100,000 check before they have a bank account. PageRank algorithm; by 2004 the most-used search engine ever.
- - PayPal Founded. December 1998. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin found Confinity (Elon Musk's X.com merges 2000; rebrands as PayPal). eBay acquires for $1.5B in 2002. The "PayPal mafia" goes on to found LinkedIn, YouTube, SpaceX, Tesla, Yelp, Palantir, Reddit.
- - Bezos in his Garage. 1997 60 Minutes profile of 33-year-old Jeff Bezos in Amazon's Bellevue warehouse. The infamous packing-the-orders-on-the-floor footage.
- - Larry & Sergey on PageRank. 1998 Stanford-era interviews with Larry Page and Sergey Brin explaining PageRank. The pitch that became one of the most valuable algorithms in history.
- - Pets.com Sock Puppet Commercial. The Pets.com sock-puppet Super Bowl XXXIV commercial. Cheerful, doomed; the most quoted relic of the dot-com bubble.
- - AOL-Time Warner Merger Announcement. January 10, 2000. Steve Case and Gerald Levin announce the $182B AOL-Time Warner merger. Peak-bubble corporate theatre; universally remembered as the worst merger in business history.
- - Wikipedia Launches. January 15, 2001. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launch Wikipedia. By 2024: 60M+ articles in 300+ languages; the most-visited reference site in human history. Operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
- - Gmail Launches. April 1, 2004. Google launches Gmail, 1 GB inbox at a time when Hotmail offered 2 MB. Many assumed it was an April Fool's joke. Invite-only until 2007; redefined what webmail could be.
- - Web 2.0 Conference Keynote. October 2004. Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0?", coined the term that defined the next decade of internet startups. AJAX, mashups, user-generated content as a programming paradigm.
- - Kindle Launch - Bezos on Charlie Rose. November 2007. Jeff Bezos demoing the first Kindle on Charlie Rose. "Wireless delivery in 60 seconds." The product that proved e-readers had a market.
- - Netscape IPO on CNN. August 9, 1995. Netscape IPO opens at $28; closes at $58.25. CNN financial-news coverage as the bubble inflates in real time.
- - Megaupload Raid. January 19, 2012. NZ police raid Kim Dotcom's mansion at FBI request; shut down Megaupload (4% of global internet traffic at the time). The largest copyright-enforcement action in internet history.
- - Tim Berners-Lee at the Olympics. July 27, 2012. Tim Berners-Lee at the London Olympics opening ceremony: "This is for everyone." Live-tweeted from the stage. The most-watched moment in the web's public history.
- - Shawn Fanning at Napster. 2000 60 Minutes / MTV coverage of 19-year-old Shawn Fanning during Napster's peak, 80M users, music industry in panic.
- - Snowden Leaks. June 2013. Edward Snowden, NSA contractor, leaks classified documents revealing global surveillance programs to Glenn Greenwald + Laura Poitras. The single most consequential whistleblowing event in modern computing.
- - Snowden Hong Kong Interview. June 9, 2013. The Glenn Greenwald + Laura Poitras Hong Kong hotel interview with Edward Snowden, days after the first NSA leaks. The most-watched investigative-journalism video of the decade.
- - Tim Cook on Privacy. September 2014. Tim Cook's open letter on privacy: "Our business is not based on collecting personal data." The differentiation pitch against Google + Facebook that defined Apple's brand for the next decade.
- - NBC Today Show: "What is the Internet?". January 1994. Bryant Gumbel asks "What is the internet, anyway?" on the Today Show. Defines the pre-web mainstream understanding of what was coming.
- - Flickr Launches. February 10, 2004. Stewart Butterfield's Flickr, the photo-sharing site that defined Web 2.0. Acquired by Yahoo! for $25M in 2005.
