through 1969 | 70's | 80's | 90's 

1990

• February 28, ARPANET was formally decommissioned and the remaining hardware dismantled. The changeover causes little disruption on the network.

• Dr. Vinton Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet laments:

• "It was the first, and being first, was best, but now we lay it down to ever rest. Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears. For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years of faithful service, duty done, I weep.  Lay down thy packet, now. O Friend, and sleep."

• (Cerf, 1989 in his "Requiem for ARPANET")

Cerf’s sentiments of were shared by other ARPANET veterans, who engaged their efforts into an uncertain experiment to a system that presently routinely serves hundreds of thousands of users. (42)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) http://www.eff.org/ is established by Mitchell D. Kapor, who also founded the Lotus Development Corporation. (43)

• Archie, which stands for "Archive Server" released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill.

• Institutions, such as the National Library of Medicine go online.

1991

• National Science Foundation’s NSFNET decides to lift commercial restrictions on the use of the network, thus opening a means for electronic commerce.

• High Performance Computing Act, which is authored by Al Gore is signed into law. (44)

• Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, is released by Thinking Machines Corporation.

• Gopher is introduced by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota. Gopher allows users to search the network, but in just pure text.

World-Wide Web (WWW) is released by CERN http://cern.web.cern.ch/CERN/ in Geneva, Switzerland.
British researcher, Tim Berner-Lee creates HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which use specifications for URLs or Uniform Resource Locators, for web addresses. (45)

• The web as we know it is born!

Figure 14, Tim Berner-Lee of CERN

1992

• Internet Society (ISOC) is formed, the organization’s members include the founders of the early Internet, ARPANET. (46)

• Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by the University of Nevada at Reno, System Computing Department. The same developers of Archie create Veronica; however, Veronica allows the user to search gopher databases. Each tool is just in plain text on computer monitors. (47)

• World Bank goes on-line.
  http://www.worldbank.org/

1993

• InterNIC formed by the NSF, provides specific Internet services:

• Directory and database services (AT&T)

• Registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)

• Information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)

• US White House goes on-line
  (http://www.whitehouse.gov)

• President George W. Bush: president@whitehouse.gov

• Vice-President Dick Cheney: vice-president@whitehouse.gov

• Mosaic, which is one of the first Internet browsers is released and proliferates the web with a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Mosaic, provides a graphical interface to search the Internet, thus making the Internet more visually appealing. Gopher’s growth is 997%

Figure 15, Mosaic browser

1994

• NASA establishes the NASA Research and Education Network (NREN), which is an experimental backbone at five NASA science centers. (48)

• MBONE audio multicast is made by the Rolling Stones for the Voodoo Lounge tour. (49)

• Yahoo!, which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is founded by two PhD students from Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo. (50)

Figure 16, (right to left) Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo Japan President Masahiro Inoue & Softbank Corp President Masayoshi Son, commemorate their success in electronic commerce.

• ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25^th anniversary, and later it’s 30^th in 1999 at UCLA. (51)

END

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