1958: | The Eisenhower administration creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in response to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. |
1961: | Leonard Kleinrock writes the first paper on the theory of "packet switching." Packet switching eventually becomes the way all data is transmitted over the Internet. |
1965: | ARPA funds a study on "cooperative network of time sharing computers." |
1968: | ARPANet is launched. The network consists of four network connections (nodes) at UCLA, Stanford, The University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. |
1971: | ARPANet consists of 15 nodes with 23 host computers. Ray Tomlinson develops an e-mail application for ARPANet. |
1972: | Tomlinson modifies the e-mail program and uses the '@' sign. |
1973: | The first international connections to ARPANet (London England and Norway). |
1974: | Launch of a commercial version of ARPANet. |
1975: | Satellite links across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans (to Hawaii and the United Kingdom). |
1980: | Tim Berners-Lee creates a program that makes it possible to forge internal connections between files on a network. |
1984: | Canada begins to connect Canadian universities. Introduction of Domain Name System (DNS). |
1985: | All Canadians universities are connected to NetNorth. |
1986: | National Science Foundation (NSF) creates NSFNET with a connection speed of 56 Kbps. |
1987: | Number of hosts estimated to be more than 10,000. |
1988: | Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden connect to NSFNET. |
1989: | The number of hosts estimated to be more than 100,000. |
1990: | Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee developed the application to share documents with colleagues. Within a decade it becomes the most important application on the Internet. |
1992: | Number of hosts estimated to be more than 1,000,000. |
1993: | Internet talk radio begins. |
1995: | Government of Canada goes online (canada.gc.ca). Netscape launched. |
1998: | Canada launches the first national optical Internet — CA*net3. |
2000: | Size of World Wide Web estimated to be more than 1,000,000,000 pages. |
2001: | First uncompressed, real time High Definition Television (HDTV) transmission across a wide area Internet Protocol (IP) network takes place. |
2002: | The number of hosts is estimated to be more than 160,000,000. |