The Network history

IBM’s Token Ring technology was launched in October, 1985 and ran at 4 Mbit/s.

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.

In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way.

In September of 1988 the first Interop trade show was born.

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.

1990 • Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the European physics lab CERN, develops a prototype for the World Wide Web, an application layer running on top of the internet that’s based on hypertext.

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.

In 1992, the Internet Activities Board was re-organized and re-named the Internet Architecture Board operating under the auspices of the Internet Society.

By 1993, the gopher developers are planning to add hyperlinks and even virtual reality features.

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

NSF’s privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone.

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.

1997 • The phrase “the Great Firewall of China” first appears in a Wired article in reference to the Chinese government’s desire to control internet access.

Jon Postel served as Director of the Computer Networks Division of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California until his untimely death October 16, 1998.

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

2000 • The dot-com bubble begins to pop.

2001 • BitTorrent, a decentralized communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing, is released.

By 2002, over 34 million subscribers are using it on their phones for web access, e-mail, mobile payments, streaming video, and many other features that the rest of the world won't see for nearly another decade.

2004 • Facebook is created, signaling a new era of social media on the internet.

2006 • Amazon Web Services begins marketing IT infrastructure to businesses, and the term “cloud computing” gains traction, referring to the storage and processing of data and applications on remote (and typically proprietary) servers.

2007 • Apple introduces the iPhone, which will quickly evolve into a dominant platform of the mobile web.

Morris will be the first person convicted under the “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.” He will apologize in 2008, saying he'd sought to estimate the Internet's size, not cause harm.

2009 • Satoshi Nakamoto launches the Bitcoin network, a digital cash system on a decentralized, cryptographically-secure peer-to-peer protocol — the first blockchain.

2010 • The Federal Communications Commission asserts the principles of net neutrality and an open internet, holding that internet service providers (ISPs) must offer equal access to all internet communications without favoring particular sites or services.

He took his first assignment about bitcoin and digital currencies in 2014, and has been writing about emerging decentralized technologies ever since.

2015 • The Ethereum Virtual Machine, an open-source, blockchain computing platform, launches.

2016 • The DFINITY Foundation is founded in Zurich to build the Internet Computer, an extension of the public internet that combines blockchain technology and novel cryptography to create a decentralized environment for interoperable software that runs directly on the open network.