The Internet

January 28, 1999

Yahoo! buys GeoCities for $3.65 billion USD. GeoCities was an early web hosting service getting its start in 1994. As a testament to its popularity, there were at least 38 million pages remaining on GeoCities when Yahoo!  shut it down in 2009.

January 27, 1994

Silicon Graphics Inc. co-founder Jim Clark leaves the company to start Mosaic Communications, the operation that later became Netscape Communications Corp. With Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen, Clark helped popularize the World Wide Web by distributing the company’s browser for free.

January 23, 1996

The first version of the Java programming language was released. The ability of Java to “write once, run anywhere” made it ideal for Internet-based applications. As the popularity of the Internet soared, so did the usage of Java.

January 21, 2000

The domain name twitter.com was registered. However, it wasn’t until 2006 that the domain was purchased by Twitter, Inc. and took the form we know today.

January 18, 1995

The domain name yahoo.com is registered. Previously, the web site was called “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. I think they chose wisely.

January 17, 1998

Matt Drudge breaks the story of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair on his website The Drudge Report. This incident brought to the limelight the emerging Internet news industry. Almost overnight it seems, traditional news media, especially newspapers, begin to lose ground to Internet news sources.

January 15, 2001

Wikipedia, a free Wiki content encyclopedia, goes online. Door-to-door encyclopedia salespeople mourn while bookshelves everywhere suddenly have more room for other books.

January 15, 1986

The National Science Foundation opens the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. In 1992 – 1993, Marc Andreesen would invent his Mosaic web browser while a student there, which he later transformed into Netscape. I remember opening the Mosaic program on a Mac in my dorm’s computer lab in 1993. Not knowing what it was, and because the homepage was set to the University of Illinois, I clicked around a few hyperlinks but quickly got bored. Little did I know what I had stumbled upon until several months later.

January 15, 1986

This day is the first meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. According to the IETF’s web site, “The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet.” I’m sure this sounds boring to you, but if it wasn’t for them you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now!