Global Networking:
a Timeline
1990-1999

Dr T. Matthew Ciolek,

Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au
http://www.ciolek.com/PEOPLE/ciolek-tm.html

Document created: 9 Jan 1999. Last updated: 4 Feb 2007

This document, intended as a reliable electronic reference tool, provides a timeline for three types of developments and milestones: (1) advances in long distance person-to-person communication; (2) advances in storage, replication, cataloguing, finding, and retrieval of data; (3) standardisation of concepts and tools for long distance interaction.

The advancements may have a: T echnical (hardware), C onceptual (software), or an O rganisational aspect, or represent an important M ilestone in the history of a given invention, and are annotated as such in the timeline.

This document is only as good as the collated information itself. Please email any additional data and corrections to tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au. Your collaboration and input is warmly appreciated.

work in progress - tmc

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	Web Global Networking Timeline

[ Home Page ]
[ Early developments ] [ 5th c. BCE ] [ 4th c. BCE ] [ 3rd c. BCE ] [ 2nd c. BCE ] [ 1st c. BCE ] [ 1st millennium CE ] [ 1000s ] [ 1100s ] [ 1200s ] [ 1300s ] [ 1400s ] [ 1500s ] [ 1600s ] [ 1700s ] [ 1800s ] [ 1810s ] [ 1820s ] [ 1830s ] [ 1840s ] [ 1850s ] [ 1860s ] [ 1870s ] [ 1880s ] [ 1890s ] [ 1900s ] [ 1910s ] [ 1920s ] [ 1930s ] [ 1940s ] [ 1950s ] [ 1960s ] [ 1970s ] [ 1980s ] [ 1990 ] [ 1991 ] [ 1992 ] [ 1993 ] [ 1994 ] [ 1995 ] [ 1996 ] [ 1997 ] [ 1998 ] [ 1999 ] [ 2000 ] [ 2001 ] [ 2002 ] [ 2003 ] [ 2004 ] [ 2005 ] [ 2006 ] [ 2007 ] [ 2008 ] [ 2009 ] [ 2010 ]
[ Acknowledgments ] [ Sources ]

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1990-1999

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• 1990 - [T] Archie FTP semi-crawler search engine, built by Peter Deutsch of MacGill University, Montreal, Canada. (Zakon 1998). An archipelago of scattered FTP archives is melded into a coherent, distributed information system.

• 1990 Dec - [T] WWW server (prototype) built. (Cailliau 1995).

• 1991 - [M] On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the Science Museum in Kensington, Great Britain, constructed a complete Difference Engine from the drawings made 1834-1871. Only two major, but easy to remedy, errors were found in the Babbage's blueprints (Lee 1994).

• 1991 - [O] Contents of the WWW are manually catalogued in form of the centralised WWW Virtual library system residing on CERN's WWW server (Secret 1996).

• 1991 - [T] CD-recordable (CD-R) technology is released (Alpeda 1998).

• 1991 Apr - [T] WAIS publisher-fed search engine, invented in April 1991 by Brewster Kahle of the Thinking Machines Co. (St.Pierre 1994). WAIS was a program for indexing, storing and, retrieving information about the contents of collections of full-text documents. It spurred proliferation of distributed (but interlinked) databases of text and graphic documents.

• 1991 Apr - [T] Gopher, created at University of Minnesota Microcomputer, Workstations & Networks Center (La Tour 1995). Integration of earlier Internet tools (Telnet, FTP, WAIS) into a seamless whole. Initially, the system was a help service for computer questions, then it started acting as a campus wide information system, and soon grew to a world-wide network as universities and governments began using Gophers to interconnect hitherto separate pockets of their digital information.

• 1991 May 17 - [T] WWW server (production version) (Cailliau 1995). The server solves the 'Big Technological 3': URL (addressing) syntax, html (markup) language for documents, and HTTP (communications protocol) in the context of the client/server model. It also offers integration of earlier Internet tools (Telnet, FTP, Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead [alas, not WAIS]) into a seamless whole.

• 1991 Dec 3 - [O] Coombspapers, the world's first Asian-studies FTP site (ftp://coombs.anu.edu.au/coombspapers/), established by the Coombs Computing Unit, ANU, Canberra, Australia (Ciolek 1997).

• 1992 - [T] Veronica Gopher crawler search engine (Zakon 1998). Veronica finds files and gopher links.

• 1992 Mar - [M] Over 10,000 FidoNet (souped-up BBS) nodes are in existence world-wide (Dodd 1992).

• 1992 May - [O] The first 'Asia-related' WAIS database, with bibliographical notes on the Thai-Yunnan region, was published by the Coombs Computing Unit at the ANU, Canberra, Australia (Ciolek 1997).

• 1992 Aug - [M] There are about 20 Web servers in existence (Ciolek 1998).

• 1992 Oct - [T] Lynx ascii WWW browser developed between July and October 1992 by Michael Grobe, Charles Rezac and Lou Montulli of Academic Computing Services at the University of Kansas (Grobe 1997).

• 1993 - [M] Microprocessor (first marketed 1971) speed reaches 100,000,000 'additions' per second (Swerdlow 1995:15).

• 1993 - [M] Over 25,000,000 licensed Windows users world-wide (Knight 1999).

• 1993 - [M] 60,000 BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) in the US (Rheingold 1994:132).

• 1993 - [C] "Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set" (UCS), aka ISO/IEC 10646 is published in 1993 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is the first officially standardized coded character set with the purpose to eventually include all characters used in all the written languages in the world (and, in addition, all mathematical and other symbols). It forms the basis for the Unicode character set specified by a consortium of major American computer manufacturers (Järnefors 1996).

• 1993 Sep 21 - [O] Contents of the WWW are manually catalogued in form of the distributed WWW Virtual library system. The first WWW VL outside CERN is that for History, constructed by Lynn Nelson at University of Kansas (Secret 1996, Nelson 1998).

• 1993 Oct - [T] Mosaic graphic WWW browser developed by Marc Andreessen (Cailliau 1995). Graphics user interface makes WWW finally a competitor to Gopher. Production of web pages becomes an easy task, even to an amateur.

• 1993 Oct - [M] There are 200+ Web servers in existence (Ciolek 1998).

• 1993 fall - [M] There are about 9 Veronica servers established at various places in the world. These were databases provided by: NYSERNet, USA; PSINet, USA; SUNET, USA; Tachyon Communications, USA; U. of Bergen, Norway; U. of Manitoba, Canada; U. Texas, Dallas, USA; U. of Koeln, Germany and U. of Pisa, Italy (Ciolek 1998).

• 1993 fall - [M] Veronicas are supplemented by Jughead databases. Jughead is local gopherspace register: it keeps track of data and links known only to single, usually large-scale, Gopher server. The other difference is that Veronicas kept records of links to all resources. Jugheads, on the other hand, were more selective and faster to use, as they dealt only with information at the subdirectory level. The most famous of the Jugheads was the one running at Washington U., St. Louis, USA (Ciolek 1998).

• 1993 fall - [T] Architext WWW crawler search engine, the future Excite SE (launched Oct 1995), developed by five Stanford university graduates (Byrne 2000).

• 1994 - [T] Britannica Online (www.britannica.com), the first encyclopedia for the Internet, makes entire text of the Encyclopaedia Britannica available worldwide. That year the first version of the Britannica on CD-ROM was also published (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003).

• 1994 Jan 25 - [M] Coombsweb, a 850th-880th WWW system in the world (coombs.anu.edu.au), constructed by the Coombs Computing Unit at the ANU, Canberra, Australia to organise online information on Social Sciences and Asian Studies (Ciolek 1997).

• 1994 Feb 14 - [T] Labyrinth graphic 3-D (vrml) WWW browser is built by Mark Pesce. It provides access to the virtual reality of three-dimensional objects (artifacts, buildings, landscapes) which readers could ambulate through and view from all possible directions, as well as use for hypertext connections with other 3-D or 2-D (i.e. ordinary) portions of the Web (Reid 1997:175)

• 1994 Mar - [T] The US Airforce launches the 24th satellite to complete the GPS constellation. The spacings of the satellites are arranged so that a minimum of five satellites are in view from every point on the globe. Precise navigation and geo-positioning is now a practical reality (Trimble Navigation Limited 1997).

• 1994 Apr - [M] Since Oct 93 some 340,000 copies of Mosaic browser software were acquired (from an FTP archive, accessible via Gopher and Web, as well as from a dedicated WWW hypertext link) and put to immediate use by the Internauts. Mosaic and her descendants - the Netscapes and Explorers - have been repeatedly and energetically downloaded and installed ever since (Reid 1997:33-68).

• 1994 Apr - [T] Aliweb WWW semi-crawler search engine (Koster 1994).

• 1994 Apr 20 - [M] WebCrawler WWW crawler search engine launched. In Mar 1995 it was sold to AOL, and in Nov 1996 it was acquired by Excite (Byrne 2000).

• 1994 May - [M] Lycos WWW crawler search engine launched. It was developed by Dr. Michael Mauldin of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and later sold to AOL (Byrne 2000).

• 1994 Aug - [M] In mid-1994, in the last days of WAIS' ascendancy on the Net there were about 650 formally registered WAIS servers and perhaps another hundred or so unregistered ones (Ciolek 1998).

• 1994 Oct 13 - [T] Netscape WWW browser, developed by Marc Andreessen, Mountain View , California (Reid 1997:33). Partial integration of the WWW and email is now possible.

• 1995 - [M] WWW data traffic surpasses that of the Minitel for the first time (Gillies and Cailliau 2000:321).

• 1995 Jan - [M] The Internet comprises 5,846,000 hosts (Internet Software Consortium 1995).

• 1995 - [M] An optic-fiber transatlantic telephone cable can carry more than 500,000 simultaneous conversations, dramatically lowering the costs (Swerdlow 1995:14).

• 1995 - [M] Microprocessor (first marketed 1971) speed reaches 250,000,000 'additions' per second (Swerdlow 1995:15).

• 1995 - [M] Throughout the Internet there were over 950 anonymous FTP archive sites (Deutsch et al. 1995) containing some 5,700,000 files comprising over 94 Gigabytes (94,000 MB) of data.

• 1995 Jan - [M] 16.5 million USENET users (Quaterman 1996).

• 1995 Feb - [M] Infoseek WWW crawler search engine launched (Byrne 2000).

• 1995 Mar - [C] Stuart Weibel and Eric Miller of OCLC leead the first workshop for The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) (dublincore.org) in Dublin, Ohio. DCMI is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent electronic information discovery systems (DCMI 2003).

• 1995 March 25 - [T] WikiWikiWeb installed on Internet domain c2.com by Ward Cunningham. Wiki technology permits construction of web sites that allow "the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring" (Wiki 2007).

• 1995 Apr - [T] RealAudio narrowcasting (Reid 1997:69).

• 1995 May 23 - [T] Java programming language, developed by Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, California (Harold 1997). Client-side, on-the-fly supplementary data processing can be performed using safe, downloadable micro-programs (applets).

• 1995 Jun - [T] Metacrawler WWW meta-search engine. The content of several WWW search engines can be quickly and automatically interrogated (Selberg 1997).

• 1995 Jul 04 - [M] Altavista harvesting software 'Scooter' first 'crawled' the WWW (Byrne 2000).

• 1995 Jul 16 - [O] The first online bookstore, Amazon.com, is launched in Seattle by Jeffrey P. Bezos. By late 1998 the cyberstore sold books to 4.5 mln people from more than 160 countries (Amazon.com 1999, Quittner 1999).

• 1995 Oct - [M] Excite WWW crawler search engine, based on 1993 Architext prototype, launched (Byrne 2000).

• 1995 Dec - [M] America Online (AOL) passes the 4 million subscriber mark (Carlson 1998).

• 1995 Dec 15 - [M] Altavista WWW crawler search engine is launched by Digital. It was built around the Digital Alpha processor. A very fast search of 30-50% of the WWW is made possible (Compaq 1998).

• 1996 Jan - [M] The Internet comprises 14,352,000 hosts (Internet Software Consortium 1996).

• 1996 Jan - [M] There are 100,000 Web servers in existence (Ciolek 1998).

• 1996 Jan 17 - [M] Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, and Phillipine President Fidel Rhamos meet for ten minutes in an online interactive chat session (Zakon 1998).

• 1996 Feb - [M] America Online (AOL) passes the 5 million subscriber mark (Carlson 1998).

• 1996 Apr - [M] About 175 North American daily newspapers are available on the World Wide Web. About 775 publications are available online worldwide (Carlson 1998).

• 1996 Apr - [T] Alexa WWW intelligent navigation adviser, developed by Brewster Kahle, San Francisco, California (Kahle & Gilliat 1996).

• 1996 Apr - [M] LeMonde, France's largest daily, launches its Web site in Paris (Carlson 1998).

• 1996 Jun 1 - [M] Paris has 15 cybercafes (Carlson 1998).

• 1996 Jun - [T] Internet Archive full text database, developed by Brewster Kahle, San Francisco, California (Kahle 1996).

• 1996 Jul 04 - [T] Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch in Freemont, CA, USA, a free, web-based e-mail system, the Hotmail. The service had 250 users within 3 hours and 100,000 users within a few days (Bronson 2000:51-52).

• 1996 Dec 8 - [M] Sue Helle and Lynn Bottoms, the first couple to do so in cyberspace, are married on-line by a minister placed in an office ten miles away, in Seattle, USA. The online ceremony was attended from the East Coast by the couple's family. (Standage 1998:196).

• 1997 - [M] 71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt, a mailing list directory (Zakon 2003).

• 1997 Jan - [M] The Internet comprises 21,819,000 hosts (Internet Software Consortium 1997).

• 1997 Jan - [M] There are 650,000 Web servers in existence (Ciolek 1998).

• 1997 - [T] DVD technology (players and movies) is released. A DVD-recordable standard is created (Alpeda 1998).

• 1997 - [M] Web TV introduced (Knight 1999).

• 1997 - [M] 190 bln emails and 190 bln pieces of first-class mail are sent each year (Young 1999:152).

• 1997 Sep - [M] Infoseek WWW crawler search engine has 7.3 million users/ month (Byrne 2000).

• 1997 Dec 8 - [C] The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announces the release of Extensible Markup Language (XML) version 1.0 (Sloan and Oldfield 1998).

• 1997 Dec 9 - [T] Digital Equipment Corporation and SYSTRAN A.G. launch "AltaVista Babelfish Translation Service" (babelfish.altavista.com), the first language translation service for Web content. The service enables online real-time translation of documents in five European languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (Ament 1998).

• 1998 Jan - [M] The Internet comprises 29,670,000 hosts (Internet Software Consortium 1998).

• 1998 Jan 22 - [O] Netscape WWW browser source code is made freely accessible to the software community (Netscape 1998). This strategic decision is influenced by the runaway successes of the Unix, TCP/IP and Linux application development paradigms.

  [This data-point was suggested by Kathy Gill and, independently, by Doug Pearson]

• 1998 Apr - [T] Google WWW crawler intelligent search engine, developed at Stanford University, California (Google 1998).

• 1998 Aug - [M] Hotmail, a free, web-based e-mail system (launched 4 Jul 1996) has 22 million users and is growing at a rate of 125,00 users a day (Bronson 2000:51-52,54).

• 1998 Aug 28 - [T] Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in the U.K., became the first human to host a microchip. The approximately 23mm-by-3mm glass capsule containing several microprocessors stayed in Warwick's left arm for nine days. It was used to test implant's interaction with computer controlled doors and lights in a futuristic 'intelligent office building' (Witt 1999).

• 1998 Dec - [O] Java source code is made freely accessible to the software community (Effinger and Mangalidan 1998).

• 1998 Dec - [M] There are 3.6 mln Web servers in existence (Zakon 1998).

• 1998 Dec - [M] More than 2.5 mln mobile phones were sold in Britain in the three months up to Christmas, raising the number of the mobile phones in Britain to 13 mln (Brookes 1999).

• 1998 - [M] There are 2,247,000 Internet users in Spain, according to "El Pais." (Carlson 2000).

• 1999 - [M] IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access (Zakon 2003).

• 1999 Jan - [M] The Internet comprises 43,230,000 hosts (Internet Software Consortium 1999).

• 1999 Jan - [M] America Online (AOL) passes the 14 million subscriber mark (Carlson 2000).

• 1999 Jan - [M] Over 1,000 WWW search engines (Horowitz 1999), over 39,000 IRC channels (Southwick 1999) and over 135,000 Listserv lists in existence (L-Soft 1999).

• 1999 Mar - [T] The Nature reports an experiment in which by hooking two paralysed sufferers of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Motor Neurone Disease, a disease in which the voluntary nervous system is destroyed) up to a computer via an electroencephalogram, US and European researchers taught the patients to mentally signal the computer to pick out letters on a screen, spelling out messages. Currently, the communication speed is very slow, about two characters a minute, but it should eventually improve (Golden 1999).

• 1999 Mar - [M] There are 4.3 mln Web servers in existence (Zakon 1999).

• 1999 Mar 24 - [C] Wireless Markup Language (WML) Specification Version 1.1 is released. WML is a markup language based on XML and is designed to cope with the constraints of small narrowband devices (cellular phones, pages, palmtop computers). These constraints include: (a) small display and limited user input facilities; (b) narrowband network connection; (c) limited memory and computational resources. WML offers: support for a variety of text and image formatting and layout commands; Hypercard style interface metaphor (all information in WML is organised into a collection of cards and decks); Inter-card navigation and linking; string parameterization and state management (Cover 2000).

• 1999 Apr - [M] NATO's war (24 Mar 99-20 Jun 99) with Serbia, is dubbed 'Web War I', due to an extensive bi-lateral use of the Web and email for information/disinformation purposes. The conflict in Kosovo is the first war in history to have its own home page (Coates 1999). The other major international media's wars are: WWI (press), WWII (radio), Vietnam War (TV) (Ciolek, notes, Apr 1999).

• 1999 Jun 25 - [C] Netomat: The Non-Linear Browser, by the New York artist Maciej Wisniewski, launched. The open-source software uses Java and XML technology to navigate the web in terms of the data (text, images and sounds) it contains, as opposed to traditional browsers (Mosaic, Lynx, Netscape, Explorer) which navigate the web's pages (Ciolek, notes, Jul 1999).

• 1999 Jul 01 - [T] Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum announces in San Francisco, USA the WAP version 1.1 of the mobile Internet standard specifications. WAP in conjunction with Wireless Markup Language (WML) application layer enable users of digital mobile phones and other wireless devices to securely access and instantly interact with Internet/intranet information and advanced telephony services (Cover 2000).

• 1999 July - [C] The first do-it-yourself blog tool - Pitas.com - is launched in Toronto, Canada by Andrew Smales. Blogs are the web-based "online diaries" in which information is organised chronologically. Blogs (or, web-logs) consist of a series of posts published by the site's owner, and comments inputted by blog's audience, an ever-fluctuating online diary community (Jensen 2003).

• 1999 Jul - [M] The publicly indexable WWW contains an estimated 800 mln pages, encompassing about 15 terabytes of information or about 6 terabytes of text after removing html tags, comments, and extra whitespace (Lawrence and Giles 1999).

• 1999 Aug - [C] Blogger.com, is launched by Evan Williams, Paul Bausch, and Meg Hourihan. This blogging tool "quickly became the largest and best-known of its kind. Part of Blogger.com's appeal is that it lets people store blogs on their own servers, rather than on a remote base. This allows them to have a personalized address (like www.yourname.com), whereas with other blogging tools your address starts at the remote server." (Jensen 2003).

• 1999 Dec - [M] 3 billion SMS (short message service) text messages were sent over GSM networks in December 1999 (The GSM Association, 5 Apr 2001).

• 1999 Dec 9 - [T] Barnes & Noble, a major US publisher and book distributor, announce that it will begin offering print-on-demand books online and at brick-and-mortar stores starting early next year. IBM will provide the technology and manufacturing components for the operation, which will eventually be available at all Barnes & Noble distribution centers, starting at the Jamesburg, N.J., facility in spring 2000 (Wilcox 1999).

• 1999 Dec 31 - [M] A global TV programme '2000Today' reports live for 25 hrs non-stop the New Year celebrations in 68 countries all over the world. It is the first ever show of that duration and geographical coverage. The programme involved a round-the-clock work of over 6000 technical personnel, and used a array of 60 communication satellites to reach 1 billion viewers from all time-zones all over the globe (The Canberra Times, 1 Jan, 2000).

Copyright (c) 1999-2007 by T. Matthew Ciolek. All rights reserved. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the "Milestones" appear in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the author first.

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