Internet Timeline

1990	. ARPAnet ends. Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web.
1992	"Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.
1993	. Mosaic Web browser developed by Marc Andreesen at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. . InterNICcreated. • Web grows by 341,000 percent in a year.
April 1994	. Netscape Communications founded. • Jeff Bezos writes the business plan for Amazon.com. . Java's first public demonstration.
Dec. 1994	Microsoft licenses technology from Spyglass to create Web browser forWindows 95.
May 23, 1995	. Sun Microsystems releases Java.
August 24, 1995	. Windows 95 released.
1996	. Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for $15,000. Browser wars begin. Netscape and Microsoft two biggest players.
1997	. business.com sold for $150,000.
January 1998	. Microsoft reaches a partial settlement with the Justice Department that allows personal computer makers to remove or hide its Internet software on new versions of Windows 95. . Netscape announces plans to give its browser away for free.
1998	. US Depart of Commerce outlines proposal to privatize DNS. ICANNcreated by Jon Postel to oversee privatization. Jon Postel dies.
1999	•AOL buys Netscape; Andreesen steps down as full-time employee. • Browsers wars declared over; Netscape and Microsoft share almost 100% of browser market. • Microsoft declared a monopoly by US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. •Shawn Fanning creates Napster, opening the possibilities of peer-to-peer file sharing and igniting a copyright war in the music industry.
2000	. Fixed wireless, high-speed Internet technology is now seen as a viable alternative to copper and fiber optic lines placed in the ground. . The Dot-Com Bubble bursts. A majority of the dot-coms ceased trading after burning through their venture capital, often without ever making a net profit.
January 10, 2000	• AOL Merges with Time-Warner. AOL shareholders take 55% stake in newly formed company.
February 2000	. A large-scale denial of service attack is launched against some major Web sites like Yahoo! and eBay, alerting Web sites to the need for tighter security measures. . 10,000,000 domain names have been registered.
September 2000	. There are 20,000,000 websites on the Internet, numbers doubling since February 2000.
July 2001	. A federal judge rules that Napster must remain offline until it can prevent copyrighted material from being shared by its users. . The Code Red worm and Sircam virus infiltrate thousands of web servers and email accounts, respectively, causing a spike in Internet bandwidth usage and security breaches.
November 2001	. The European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet. . First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2.
January 2002	. .name begins resolving
January 2003	. The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading DDoS attacks ever, taking only 10 minutes to spread worldwide. . The Internet celebrates its 'unofficial' 20th birthday.
September 2003	. The RIAA sues 261 individuals for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks
December 2003	. The Research project "How much information 2003" finds that Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year and that e-mail generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
2005	. YouTube.com launches
2006	. There are an estimated 92 million Web sites online
May 2006	. A massive DDOS assault on Blue Security, an anti-spam company, is redirected by Blue Security staff to their Movable Type-hosted blog. The result is that the DDOS instead knocks out all access to over 1.8 million active blogs.
August 2006	. AOL announces that they will give for free virtually every service for which it charged a monthly fee, with income coming instead from advertising.
October 2006	. There are an estimated 92 million Web sites online (some stats say over 100 million) . Google Inc. acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.
January 2007	. Microsoft launches its various consumer versions of Microsoft Vista.
February 2007	. Apple surpasses one billion iTunes downloads.
March 2007	. 1.114 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.
April 2007	. Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as "the most valuable global brand," and also is the most visited Web site. http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/timeline.asp