The Internet
eBay Founded
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.
First Search Engine
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?
First Building Block of the Internet
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.
The Birth of Linux
August 25, 1991
Linus Torvalds posts a message to the Internet newsgroup comp.os.minix with the subject line “What would you like to see most in minix?” This is the first announcement that he is working on an operating system that will one day become Linux.
Google’s IPO
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.
The First Internet Explorer
August 16, 1995
Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer, which at the time was a modified version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed. Later when Microsoft began including Internet Explorer for free with Windows, Spyglass sued Microsoft for not paying what they felt were the proper royalties. Microsoft settled for $8 million.
Windows Gets Blasted
August 11, 2003
The Blaster worm, also known as MSBlast or Lovesan, begins to spread on the Internet, infecting Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers. The primary symptom of the worm was the crashing of the RPC service, which would trigger the computer to shut itself down and reboot as shown in the graphic. Microsoft estimated the number of machines infected between 8 and 16 million. Damage caused by the worm was estimated at $320 million.
🥳 Happy World Emoji Day! 🌎🎉📅
July 17, 2014
Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia, creates World Emoji Day, a celebration of emojis, the now ubiquitous icons we use in text communication to visually represent emotional cues. Burge chose the date of July 17th because Apple’s emoji for calendar displays July 17, in reference to the date that Steve Jobs originally introduced Apple’s iCal software.
World Emoji Day has become so popular that it has influenced the design of the calendar emoji on other platforms. Originally, companies other than Apple used a variety of dates on their calendar emoji. As World Emoji Day grew in popularity, the various dates caused confusion. So as of the writing this article in 2023, most major platforms now display July 17 on their calendar emoji. Microsoft and Facebook being notable exceptions 📅🙄
Code Red Worms its Way into the Internet
July 13, 2001
The Code Red worm is released onto the Internet. Targeting Microsoft’s IIS web server, Code Red had a significant effect on the Internet due to the speed and efficiency of its spread. Much of this was due to the fact that IIS was often enabled by default on many installations of Windows NT and Windows 2000. However, Code Red also affected many other systems with web servers, mostly by way of side-effect, exacerbating the overall impact of the worm, ensuring its place in history among the many malware outbreaks infecting Windows systems in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.
AOL Settles Lawsuit on Billing Practices
July 6, 1996
America Online settles 11 class action lawsuits alleging misleading billing practices. Among the claims raised against AOL were that customers were not aware that charges were rounded up to the next full minute, that 15 seconds were added to each session for “connection time”, and occasionally billing customers for time in “free areas”. AOL continued to charge by the hour until December of that year, switching to a flat monthly rate of $19.95. Who here remembers that point in time when this pricing change caused AOL to have such a huge spike in new users that for a time it was almost impossible to connect to AOL due to the busy signals!
AOL was a major driver of the growth of Internet usage in the 1990’s as their blanket marketing campaign of distributing free trial disks was the introduction for many people to the nascent global network. It is reported that at one point in the 1990s, half of all CDs pressed were AOL installers. To illustrate AOL’s growth, and by proxy users accessing the Internet, from 200,000 subscribers in 1993 when AOL first offered Internet access, AOL had grown to 1 million subscribers in 1994, 4 million in 1995, 8 million in 1996, 10 million in 1999, and through continued growth by marketing and acquisitions of other online services such as Compuserve, 23 million subscribers in the year 2000 where they made over $4 billion in subscription fees. In 2001 AOL made the biggest merger in history at the time with Time Warner and in 2002 reached over 26 million users before the emergence of broadband DSL and cable Internet services began the slow decline of the once-dominant company.