The Internet

September 19, 1982

In a posting made to a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board, Professor Scott Fahlman proposes the first known use of emoticons (also known as smilicons or smileys). While the use of emoticons became widespread during the 80’s and 90’s, their origin remained unknown until September 10, 2002, when the original message was retrieved from backup tape.

The following is the original message:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman             :‌-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:‌-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:‌-(

Side note, personally I may have been the first to use a smilicon in printed form when I put one in my high school yearbook with my senior quote under my picture. Edwardsville High School Class of 1992!

September 10, 1990

The first Internet search engine, Archie, is launched. It was used to index FTP archives to make finding files easier. However, as the technology for the World Wide Web was not invented until later in the year, it was not the first web search engine.

September 4, 1998

Larry Page and Sergey Brin file incorporation papers for Google in California. Filing on a Friday, the date of official incorporation would be marked as Monday, September 7th. Starting out as a privately held company, Google would hold their IPO about 6 years later on August 19, 2004.

September 3, 1995

The online auction site, eBay, is launched as “AuctionWeb” by Pierre Omidyar. The first item sold, a broken laser pointer, wasn’t actually intended to sell, but rather to test the new site, itself started as a hobby. Surprised that the item sold for $14.83, Omidyar contacted the buyer to make sure he knew the laser pointer was broken, to which was replied, “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” From that first $14.83, Omidyar is now worth billions of dollars.

September 2, 1993

The world’s first primitive web search engine is started. Known as W3Catalog or the CUI WWW Catalog, it was started by Oscar Nierstrasz at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva. This search site lasted for about 3 years before more modernized search engines began appearing.

I could not find an actual picture of W3Catalog, only a picture of a site linking to it. Can anybody help find me a picture of W3Catalog?

August 30, 1969

The first Interface Message Processor (IMP) is delivered to Leonard Kleinrock’s research group at UCLA. The IMP was the device that would interconnect networks between research facilities on the developing ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. As a packet-switching device, the IMP can be considered the first generation of what we now call network routers. The second IMP was delivered to the Stanford Research Institute on October 1, 1969 and the first message between the two IMPs was sent on October 29, 1969, which is now considered the first message ever sent on the Internet.

August 19, 2004

Google holds its Initial Public Offering (IPO) selling over 22 millions shares at a starting price of $85. Google shares closed that day at $100.34 and the IPO created many instant millionaires and a few billionaires.