Major Events in the History of the Internet (NZ focus)

INTERNET STARTED

Oct 29, 1969

The ARPANET first went live in October 1969, with communications between the University of California in Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. In effect, they were the first hosts on what would one day become the Internet.

EMAIL

Jul 15, 1971

Email was launched:
Email was first developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the computer name (which later on became the domain name).

PC MODEM

Apr 5, 1977

First PC modem:
Dennis C. Hayes and Dale Heatherington invented the PC modem in 1977, establishing the critical technology that allowed today's online and Internet industries to emerge and grow. They sold the first Hayes modem products to computer hobbyists.

NZ INTERNET

Feb 4, 1993

NZ's FIRST Internet connection:
New Zealand's first internet connection was via Waikato University, managed by John Houlker. The capacity went from 64 kbit/s to 128 kbit/s between February 1993 and February 1994.

AMAZON.COM

Jul 31, 1995

Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Originally the business was based out of his garage in his Bellevue, Washington home. A businessman by the name of Nick Hanauer believed in Bezos’ idea and decided to invest $40,000 in the venture. When Amazon first decided to go online, its layout was not as flashy as it is today. A man by the name of Tom Alburg decided to invest $100,000 in Amazon in 1995, which helped the company fund a better looking website and hosting capabilities.

HOTMAIL

Jul 4, 1996

First webmail service founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was one of the very first services to offer free web-based e-mail. Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft late in 1997. Hotmail continued to grow very quickly – reaching tens of millions of users in just a few years. Today, Hotmail has provisioned well over a billion inboxes and has several hundred million active users around the world.

WEBLOG

Dec 17, 1997

While the first blogs had been around for a few years in one form or another, 1997 was the first year the term "weblog" was used. The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com

GOOGLE

Sep 4, 1998

Google went live in 1998, revolutionizing the way in which people find information online.

WIKIPEDIA

Jan 15, 2001

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by financier Jimmy Wales. It is a free encyclopedia that has an open editing system that allows anyone to edit its content. The name 'Wikipedia' is a combination of the word wiki and encyclopedia. It has 800 million page views per day.

MYSPACE

Aug 1, 2003

Tom Anderson and Chris Dewolfe co-founded MySpace in 2003. MySpace is a social network service, allowing you to chat, post pictures, and stay in touch with friends and family. It later grew to be the most popular social network at one time (thought it has since been overtaken by Facebook).

FACEBOOK

Feb 1, 2004

Facebook launched in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room. At the time it was only open to college students and was called "The Facebook"; later on, "The" was dropped from the name, though the URL http://www.thefacebook.com still works.

YOUTUBE

Feb 15, 2005

YouTube launched in 2005. Founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. They developed the idea for YouTube after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party. YouTube provides free online video hosting and sharing to the masses.

TWITTER

Mar 21, 2006

Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. Twitter is the fastest growing free micro-blogging software that allows you to keep in touch with people through quick, frequent answers to one question: What are you doing? "Tweet" is the term for the 140 maximum character messages posted on Twitter. For tweeting to be effective, it must be done systematically, with posts being made daily.

Ultra Fast Broadband

Sep 16, 2009

The NZ Government announced the details of the Ultra Fast Broadband Initiative in September 2009, committing NZ$1.5 billion to accelerate the roll-out of ultra fast broadband to 75% of homes over 10 years.

FUTURE

Jan 1, 2020

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020. It is predicted that voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.