The Internet

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!

January 9, 2009

Through a posting to The Cryptography Mailing List, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto releases the first version of the Bitcoin software and launches the network of the decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. Six days earlier, Nakamoto had generated the first block of 50 bitcoins, now known as the Genesis Block.

Bitcoin has slowly but steadily gained momentum as its users appreciate the fact that no one entity can control, manipulate, or deactivate the digital currency, along with it being an extremely private form of payment. Bitcoin has the potential to become “the currency of the future,” which means it could completely change the way our society functions in regards to money, government, and the economy – which basically means it could change almost everything about the way the world works. Not bad for some open source code.

This isn’t really the Bitcoin Genesis Block, but you knew that, right?

January 3, 2009

The pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mines the first 50 bitcoins, now known as the Genesis Block, six days before the initial release of the bitcoin software and launch of the cryptocurrency network. Bitcoin has become the de-facto digital currency, popular for its decentralized approach because no single entity can control, manipulate, or deactivate the currency and transactions can be highly private yet still remain secure.

January 1, 1985

The Internet’s Domain Name System is created. If only I had the foresight back then to start registering .com names!

NORDU.NET was the first domain created on this day, for purposes of hosting the first domain root server, nic.nordu.net. However, the first domain to actually be registered was symbolics.com a couple of months later on March 15th, 1985.

January 1, 1983

The ARPANET officially changes to using the Internet Protocol, creating the first component of the modern Internet.

December 27, 1999

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is named Person of the Year by Time Magazine.

December 25, 1990

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), along with with his associate Robert Cailliau, were operating the first web server, info.cern.ch, and first web browser/editor, WorldWideWeb, which were reportedly able to communicate over the Internet by this date. Running on a pair of NeXT workstations, the exact date that everything was truly functioning for the first time is lost to history, but according to Berners-Lee, it was functional by the time the Christmas holiday care around that year.

Interestingly enough, Berners-Lee and his wife were also expecting their first child, due on Christmas Eve. The baby was not born until New Year’s Day, however. Regardless, in essence Tim Berners-Lee fathered two babies during the 1990 holiday season!

December 24, 1994

Seven years after introducing the GIF format, during which it became a defacto standard because of its efficient compression algorithm, Compuserve reaches a licensing agreement with Unisys over the use of the patented LZW method in the GIF specification. CompuServe was not aware of the patent when it used the LZW technique in 1987 and Unisys was not aware that LZW was used in the GIF format until 1993. By the time the settlement was reached, the use of the GIF format had become widespread on the early world wide web. During the announcement of the licensing agreement with Compuserve, Unisys made it known that they expected all commercial services or software that used the GIF format or the LZW method to pay licensing fees. While the arrangement would likely not have affected anyone who used GIF graphics on their web sites, the announcement was generally met with outrage. Many people and organizations criticized Unisys for attempting to collect licensing fees on a format that was commonly considered to be freely available. The most famous condemnation was the “Burn All GIFs” campaign by the League for Programming Freedom. The uproar over the GIF licensing arrangement led to the development of the patent-free PNG format. The LZW patent expired worldwide during 2003 and 2004 so the GIF file format is now completely free to use.