A Brief History of the Internet

No medium in recent years has had such a great impact on us as the INTERNET - though its birth was simply a matter of pure chance More than one and a half billion people are online daily.

1964 - The idea
Paul Baran lays the theoretical foundation for the Internet with his treatise “On Distributed Communication".

1969 - The forerunner
The USA starts the first big test: “Arpanet” goes online. It only connects four research institutes with each other.

1978 - New network standard
The protocol IPv4, which is used even today, is introduced. With it, computers can be identified by their IP addresses.

1984 - Sending emails
The American platform, CSNET, sends the first text message to Germany on 2nd August 1984. the recipient is computer scientist, Werner Zorn, at the Karlsruhe University.

1988 - Internet relay chat
The Finnish student, Jarkko Oikarinen, first brings forward the idea of chatting on the Internet. The first system was developed as early as in 1981 in the computer network BITNET.

1989 - ISDN
ISDN is the highlight of CeBIT.  Approximately 75 DM is the charge for a transmission of 64 Kbps.

1989 - The www interface

British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, is the founder of the modern Internet. He develops HTML, the World Wide Web service and the first web server.

1990 - Opening of the network
The outdated “Arpanet” is hopelessly overloaded and is shut down. The NSF-NET (National Science Foundation) takes up its tasks and opens the net for commercial purposes for the first time.

1994 - Netscape Navigator

The browser that is based on “Mosaic” offers a lot of comfortable functions for easy surfing and becomes the market leader within a year.

1995 - Online shops

The first shops go online - Amazon the small web book dealer, being one among them. Today, the company has a turnover of about 15 million USD.

1998 - Search engines

1999 - Online auctions
Bargain hunters and private retailers discover the Internet. eBay goes online in Germany by buying the auction house Alando.

1999 – DSL
The telecom provides the first large cities, which include Berlin and Munich, with DSL access. The transmission goes up to a maximum of 768 Kbps.

2000 - Dotcom bubble
There is an explosion in the spreading of start-ups, a stock hysteria is created. Firms cannot withstand the high winning expectations and the market collapses.

2001 - Peer to peer

Filesharing becomes a popular sport. The exchange market Napster has up to 60 million users. The first lawsuit breaks out and the service temporarily goes offline.

2004 - Online games
“World of warcraft” brings the secondary phenomenon of “Online games” into the mass market. Today, the game has about 12 million subscribers.

2005 - Web 2.0
Static homepages begin to pall and start getting replaced by “join-in” Internet. Sites such as studiVZ and Wikipedia are the new highlights on the net.

2007 - The mobile net

Apple’s iPhone shows you how much fun you can have while surfing on your cell phone, for the first time. Competitors follow and mobile Internet gains popularity.

The Future - Always online
The Webciety: Cell phones are permanently connected to the web. Even TV devices have an Internet connection – IPTV slowly replaces the classic TV. Through Cloud Computing, tools can be stored on the net and the user can access them from anywhere.