A Brief History of the Internet for Reporters

A discussion led by Chris Harvey
Multimedia instructor and assessment director, University of Maryland College of Journalism

It all started with ARPANET. This precursor to the Internet was funded by the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency and was launched in 1969 as a way of exchanging information between scholars based at computers at four different locations: 

  • the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA);
  • the Stanford Research Institute; 
  • the University of California, Santa Barbara; and
  • the University of Utah. 
(UCLA was the first node of the network, Stanford the second, according to the Internet Society.) The intent was to create a decentralized communication network.

The network was put under the control of the U.S. Defense Communications Agency in 1975. ARPANet converted to a standard protocol in January 1984 and was renamed the Internet.

Microsoft, Apple and IBM:

  • A very young Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 launched a software company in Gates' dorm room at Harvard. The company would be called Microsoft. 
  • Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers in 1976, working from the Jobs' family garage in Mountain View, Calif. Like Gates, Jobs was a brilliant college drop-out--he left Reed College in Portland, Ore., after six months. Wozniak was a brilliant computer engineer. Jobs was 21 when he launched Apple. The two would lead the way in revolutioning computers, making them cheap and appealing to the masses. Their first computer sold for $666.66 each. Apple would later revolutionize the delivery of audio and music with the iPod, the design of mobile phones with the iPhone, and the design of tables with the iPad. (For a terrific bio on Jobs, see "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson.)
  • IBM launched the first PC in August 1981. It sold 50,000 units in eight months. 

The World Wide Web and Mosaic:

  • Hypertext linking of Internet pages was invented in 1989 by English physicist Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. He named his project the WorldWideWeb in May 1990. By the spring of 1991, testing was underway on a browser that would run on any computer or terminal. Though the terms "Web" and "Internet" are often used interchangeably in casual conversation, they are, in fact, different. Think of the Web as a giant subset of the Internet. (Another subnetwork of the Internet includes Instant Messaging, for instance.)

  • By November 1992, there were 26 Web servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to more than 200 known Web servers, according to CERN.

  • Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser for Windows, was developed in 1993 at the University of Illinois by Mark Andreesen and Eric Bina. In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Chicago released the first version of Mosaic, which allowed graphics and photos to be displayed with text on Web pages --and made the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes. (Earlier browsers only allowed pictures to be seen as separate files.)

News on the Internet:

News organizations, many that had been experimenting with other online services since the early 1980s, rushed to get a presence on the Internet and World Wide Web in the 1990s, following the development of Mosaic. 

Locally, USA Today launched its Internet product in April 1995; washingtonpost.com launched on the Internet in the summer of 1996, converting from a paid online service called Digital Ink that was run over AT&T phone lines; SunSpot.net, the online site of the Baltimore Sun, launched in September 1996. The Sun site was later renamed baltimoresun.com.

For a state-by-state listing of online newspapers, see: http://www.refdesk.com/paper.html

Yahoo!:

Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, Ph.D. students at Stanford. It would evolve into one of the leading search tools--claiming more than 20 billion searchable Web "objects" in early 2009--according to the UC Berkeley Library.

Google:

The now-ubiquitous search engine launched in September 1998 in Menlo Park, Calif., by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had met three years earlier as graduate students at Stanford University.

(Brin earned his B.S. degree in math and computer science at the University of Maryland.)

Blogger and the Beginnings of Web 2.0:

The self-publishing tool Blogger launched in August 1999 by a small San Francisco company called Pyra Labs.

It gave ordinary citizens a voice on the Internet, without having to learn much Internet coding (html).

It also allowed for instant feedback from readers. (The site Technorati was tracking more 112.8 million blogs, produced from a variety of tools, by January 2008, and more than 1.33 million by September 2013.)

Google buys blogger in 2003.

Friendster, Myspace, Facebook and other Social Networking Sites:

The social networking site Friendster was launched by entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002. It allows users to connect with friends through online profiles, photos, videos, blogs, forums and more. It was followed in 2003 by myspace.com ("the online community that lets you meet your friends' friends").

Facebook.com ("a social utility that connects you with the people around you") followed in 2004.

Delicious:

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us): Founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, purchased by Yahoo! in 2005, and AVOS Systems in 2011-- the site allows users to store and share bookmarks online. It uses tags to help sort them.

Flickr:

Flickr is launched in 2004 by a Vancouver-based company called Ludicorp; it allows amatuer and professional photographers to upload, organize and present photos and video, and uses tagging to help with sorting and finding. It's acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

YouTube:

YouTube is launched in February 2005 as a personal video-sharing service. (Its banner declares, "Broadcast Yourself.") The site boasts it has grown into an "entertainment destination"; people watch hundreds of millions of videos daily on the site, according to its press room.

Some of the videos might even be considered art, Washington Post movie critic Ann Hornaday argues.

Purchased by google in November 2006, it's now an independent subsidiary of the search engine giant.

Twitter:

This 140-character messaging service was publicly launched in August 2006, allowing communication from computers or handheld devices to one or many followers. Journalists can use the microblogging tool to tout their stories, follow other discussions for story ideas, search for sources, interact with followers and post updates on breaking news events from the field.

Foursquare:

Foursquare is created in 2009 as a location-based social-networking site; it allows users to check in to locations, and friends and others to track their whereabouts and suggest places to visit. Businesses can also engage with users. The site runs on GPS-enabled mobile devices. The company was reporting 10 million registered users in June 2011, and a "community" of more than 30 million by January 2013.

Storify:

Storify launches in beta in 2010. It allows users to quickly put together a "story" by dragging and dropping in elements from social media--tweets, flickr photos, Facebook statuses, YouTube videos--content in the public domain. See a video explanation on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_rUsQpE2U&feature=youtu.be."Stories" can also be rendered as slide shows. The company, based in San Francisco, was co-founded by former Associated Press reporter Burt Herman and Xavier Damman of Belgium, who had a vision to publish social media on mainstream media.

Pinterest:

News sites are just beginning to explore possible social uses for Pinterest, a virtual pinboard.

For a fun/scary/hopeful projection into the future of the media and social networking, view Robin Sloan's EPIC 20015. See more on the movie.

Additional Sources: 

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Last updated: Sept. 3, 2013

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 Chris Harvey. Permission is granted to freely print, for classroom use, up to 100 copies of the most up-to-date version of this document, as long as the document is not modified and copyright information is left intact.