Internet Timeline

The history of the internet began in the late 1950's. The first major instance took place in 1957, when the first artificial sattelite, Sputnik, was launched into space by the USSR. In response, the US government started ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency. The US did this in attempt to become the world leader in science and technology. Nine years later in 1965, ARPA hosted a study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers." A few years later, two computers, one from MIT and another from the SDC, were connected to a 1200bps phoneline.
In 1971 a network is finally developed at UCLA, Stanford, UC- Santa Barbara, Univeristy of Utah, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Upper Iowa University, Case Western Reserve University, Central Michigan University, and NASA.
In 1975, the first all inclusive e-mail program is developed by John Vittal. Then is 1984, the domain name system is developed. ( i.e.: .com, .edu, & .gov .) In 1990 the Internet is finally introduced to the public with access through dial-up provided by World.std.com .
The World Wide Web is released by The European Organization for Nuclear Research in 1991. Three years later, shopping malls, banks, radio stations, and advertising become commonplace online. The next year, companies like Comupserve, AOL, and Prodigy put households across the world online. In 1999, companies begin providing free computers to the public with a signed contract for Internet service. The next year in 2000, the size of the web is established to exceed 1 billion pages. Napster is also in full swing.
By the year 2004, Network Solutions offers the one hundred year domain name registration.

• Currenty, the percentage of Americans online is 63%, and increasing.
• 39% of homes use dial-up today, versus the 59% that use high-speed.
• Tim Berners Lee was the inventor of the World Wide Web.
• Vannevar Bush died before the invention of the World Wide Web. But, his 1945 article entitled "As We May Think", gave the initial idea for what today is known as hypertext. In his article, Bush described an idea of a machine called the "memex." This machine would allow the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations, as hypertext does today.

Sources:

http://internet-browser-review.toptenreviews.com/important-events-in-the-history-of-the-world-wide-web.html