The Internet

April 13, 2000

The heavy metal group Metallica sues Napster, alleging copyright infringement and racketeering. This lawsuit, later joined by Dr. Dre, as well as other lawsuits from the RIAA, eventually caused the original Napster service to shut down and file bankruptcy. However, the Pandora’s Box that Napster opened could not be closed and digital distribution changed the music industry forever.

As for Metallica, their reputation was tarnished for some time by this move. Ironically, Metallica owed much of their early popularity to the spread of unauthorized copies of their early albums. As the heavy metal genre in general and Metallica in particular did not get much airplay at that time, it was reported that Metallica quietly encouraged the free spread of their music in the early 80’s. Therefore many viewed Metallica’s action against Napster as hypocritical and greedy.

April 7, 1969

Steve Crocker, a graduate student at UCLA and part of the team developing ARPANET, writes the first “Request for Comments“. The ARPANET, a research project of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was the foundation of today’s modern Internet. RFC 1 defined the design of the host software for communication between ARPANET nodes. This host software would be run on Interface Message Processors or IMPs, which were the precursor to Internet routers. The “host software” defined in RFC 1 would later be known as the Network Control Protocol or NCP, which itself was the forerunner to the modern TCP/IP protocol the Internet runs on today.

There is a very interesting history to how RFCs came about, itself fittingly documented in RFC 1000. Long story short, the initial design of the ARPANET was not well defined. The students and researchers on the ARPANET team were expecting professionals from the government to come in and define their objectives more clearly. As it started to become evident that there was no specific design forthcoming and possibilities were being discussed informally, the working group decided that they should start writing down and organizing their ideas. However, they were also concerned that by formally documenting their concepts that it might seem like they were taking authority and would possibly offend some hypothetical “official protocol designers” from the government. Therefore Steve Crocker chose to carefully title the document “Request for Comments” so that the point was made that these were not official publications and that in fact, they were asking for others working on the project to add their input. As more RFC documents were written describing and defining the earliest building blocks of the ARPANET, these became the unofficial method of documentation and discussion within the ARPANET Networking Working Group (itself loosely defined in RFC 3). This laid the foundation for the eventual Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which today establishes many official Internet Standards. Today RFCs are the official publication of the IETF where Internet developments are proposed and official Internet Standards are defined. As of early 2023 there have been nearly 9500 RFCs published.

April 5, 1995

Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema release to the Internet the Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks, known by its acronym, SATAN. SATAN is a network scanner for investigating the vulnerability of remote systems. Designed for use by network administrators, the program will soon generate controversy over the ethics of freely releasing powerful security tools to the general public. And it didn’t please the Church Lady one bit, either.

April 4, 1994

Ironically, 19 years to the day after Microsoft was formed, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark create the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which will later be renamed Netscape Communications Corporation. Andreessen had developed the Mosaic web browser while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

April 1, 2004

The now ubiquitous Gmail service is launched as an invitation-only beta service. At first met with skepticism due to it being launched on April Fool’s Day, the ease of use and speed that Gmail offered for a web-based e-mail service quickly won converts. The fact that Gmail was invitiation-only for a long time helped fueled a mystique that those who had a Gmail address were hip and uber-cool. Those of us who are actually hip and uber-cool didn’t mind, of course, as those types of things don’t bother hip and uber-cool people.

March 26, 1999

The first e-mail virus to cause widespread damage and one of the fastest spreading viruses in history, Melissa was released into the wild on an early Friday morning and within three days would infect between 100,000 and 250,000 computers around the world. Targeting Microsoft Word and Outlook, the virus did not directly cause any damage, but the sheer volume of e-mail that it generated crashed many corporate *cough* Microsoft *cough* e-mail servers.

The malware first showed up on the alt.sex usenet group and was apparently named by its creator, David L. Smith, after an exotic dancer. He was arrested a few days later on April 1st, 1999 and accused of causing $80 million worth of damages. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

March 21, 2006

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sends the world’s first (non-automated) tweet:

“just setting up my twttr”

Soon to be followed by the just as engrossing

“inviting coworkers”

A note to future entrepreneurs: when doing the “first” of anything, it may be for posterity so try to be interesting. Kthnx.

March 20, 2005

Yahoo! acquires the company Ludicorp along with its popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Later in June of 2017, Verizon Purchased Yahoo! and then in April of 2018 SmugMug bought Flickr. It was reported in 2011 that Flickr hosted 6 billion photos.

March 19, 1986

The domains ibm.com and sun.com come online. These domains are considered the 11th and 12th oldest domains in history.

March 16, 1995

The worlds first Wiki, WikiWikiWeb is gets its start as Ward Cunningham sends an e-mail inviting people to add and edit content. Cunningham officially launches WikiWikiWeb 9 days later on March 25th.

A Wiki is a database that can be a community collaboration. Rather than calling his creation “quick-web”, Cunningham said the inspiration for the name Wiki came from the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus he learned of during a trip to Hawaii, “wiki wiki” meaning “quick” or “fast” in the Hawaiian language. Six years later, Wikipedia is launched, although Cunningham has no official involvement.