Athens Distributing Company history

These ideas were first realized in ARPANET, which established the first host-to-host network connection on October 29, 1969.

In 1974 it announces Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a set of protocols designed for less centralized networks.

Bolt Beranek and Newman, which had built the original IMP and designed important parts of the ARPAnet, had also been a key participant in ARPA’s 1977 internetworking experiments.

TCP, which originally included the Internet protocol (IP), a global addressing mechanism that allowed routers to get data packets to their ultimate destination, formed the TCP/IP standard, which was adopted by the United States Department of Defense in 1980.

At its official 1983 launch, the Internet had been a modest experimental network of networks owned by the United States government.

In 1985–86 NSF funded the first five supercomputing centres—at Princeton University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Illinois, and Cornell University.

Usenet is the first; though mostly for geeks its discussion groups are quite popular and it gets ported to run over the Internet by 1986.

At the instigation of computer pioneers, Senator Al Gore begins working in 1987 on what will become his High Performance Computing and Communication Act.

These new commercial capabilities accelerated the growth of the Internet, which as early as 1988 had already been growing at the rate of 100 percent per year.

At the world’s biggest physics laboratory, CERN in Switzerland, English programmer and physicist Tim Berners-Lee submits two proposals for what will become the Web, starting in March of 1989.

DEC and Xerox will also begin commercializing their own proprietary networks, DECNET and XNS. At it’s peak around 1990, IBM’s SNA will quietly carry most of the world's networking traffic.

When it is funded in 1991, the Act creates the National Information Infrastructure, which promotes and funds over $600 million worth of various networking initiatives.

By 1992 the Internet will have emerged as the new global standard, linking a million computers.

In 1993 federal legislation allowed NSF to open the NSFNET backbone to commercial users.

In 1994, Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) founds the CommerceNet consortium to encourage Web commerce, and demonstrates secure credit-card transactions that same year.

In 1995, after extensive review of the situation, NSF decided that support of the NSFNET infrastructure was no longer required, since many commercial providers were now willing and able to meet the needs of the research community, and its support was withdrawn.

At the end of 1996, the 36 million Web users surpass the 30 million or so on France’s Minitel, until now the most popular online system.

In 1998, after four years of study, the Internet Engineering Task Force published a new 128-bit IP address standard intended to replace the conventional 32-bit standard.

Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo creates the i-mode networking standard for mobile data in 1999.

In early 2000, business fundamentals reassert themselves.