August 13th, 2005
Special Report: 10 Years on the Web, a Look Back at Major Milestones
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
I started working online in 1995, back when people were calling the Internet the “information superhighway” and asking questions like “who owns the Internet? (I actually overheard that exact question at a party from a now very high up person who would DIE if they knew they once asked this loudly in public.) Let’s just say they were gentler times, and the carpetbaggers and sock puppets were a long way off.
So to celebrate the August 9th, 1995 IPO of Netscape, here are 10 milestone of where we’ve been and where we are today. Enjoy.
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By Danny Bradbury
1995: BROWSERS AND PORTALS
On 9 August Netscape floats, ushering in a five-year dot.com boom. The $3bn flotation is the most spectacular in a series of commercial landmarks that includes the launch of Amazon.com (in July) and direct internet services from CompuServe (April) and AOL (October), which allow subscribers to the different services to exchange e-mails. But it is the mass availability of Netscape’s user-friendly browser (launched in 1994) that brings the internet to ordinary people with PCs and Macs rather than specialists with Unix terminals.
* Annual fee introduced for the registration of domain names.
* Microsoft starts giving away Internet Explorer 1.0 with its Windows 95 operating system.
* RealAudio launched.
* The Vatican releases a web site.
* AltaVista search engine launched.
1996: ONLINE TRAVEL TAKES OFF
Expedia and Travelocity launch their online travel services in the US. Pioneers of the internet phenomenon of “disintermediation” (cutting out the middleman), these sites pave the way for no-frills airlines such as Easyjet and Ryanair (which go online in 1998 and 2000 respectively) to sell their services at hitherto unimaginably low prices. The ease, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of internet booking has subsequently brought scores of once exotic locations within financial range of British travelers, transforming local economies around the world.
* Israeli company Mirabilis introduces instant messaging with its ICQ service.
* Yahoo floats. Company value hits $1bn.
* Netscape’s share of browser market peaks at 87 per cent. (Internet Explorer has 4 per cent.)
* Tesco begins Tesco Direct service.
* Ebay’s AuctionWeb receives its millionth bid and is renamed eBay.
1997: THE SHOP.COM BOOM
AOL’s subscriber base reaches 10 million (up from 5 million in 1996), while amazon.com records its millionth customer. The latter’s initial public offering (which raises $54m) highlights the potential of e-commerce. The scramble for web “presence” accelerates. Its importance had already been seen in December 1996, when Harrods won the right to use the harrods.com domain name from a cybersquatter who had tried to charge it £100,000 for the privilege. In January the business.com domain sells for $150,000. Two years later it sells again for $7.5m.
* NASA’s website receives 46 million hits when Pathfinder sends back pictures from Mars.
* First recorded use of the term “weblog” to describe an online journal.
* NASA’s website receives 46 million hits when Pathfinder sends back pictures from Mars.
* Members of online Heaven’s Gate cult commit mass suicide.
Click on the “More” Link Below to Read All Ten Moments < ---Worth your while
1998: RISE OF SEARCH ENGINES
Google, started by two Stanford graduates, initially serves 10,000 queries per day, but within a year is answering 3 million. Today it serves over 250 million per day - almost half of all US-originated queries - and indexes 8 billion pages.
* Online Drudge Report breaks story of Clinton-Lewinsky relationship. When the Starr Report into the scandal is released online eight months later, the internet has its busiest day ever.
* Launches of Egg online banking, amazon.co.uk, easyjet.co.uk and lastminute.com.
* Every nation in the world is online.
1999: FILE-SHARING
Student Shawn Fanning launches the Napster peer-to-peer service, enabling computers to share files directly with each other. Within months, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has begun legal action for copyright infringement. Further lawsuits follow, and, although its user base reaches 26 million by 2001, Napster dies out, selling its name to Roxio.
* SETI@Home service launches, using spare computing power on PCs worldwide to analyse radio signals from space for signs of alien life.
* BlackBerry launches in US.
* Melissa virus infects 1 million PCs worldwide.
* A list of MI6 agents is released on the web.
* Tesco launches online shopping.
* Egg launches UK’s first internet credit card.
* US Department of Commerce describes online sales as “a major indicator of [US] economic health”.
2000: THE BUBBLE BURSTS
AOL agrees $350bn merger with “old media” giant Time Warner. The Nasdaq new-tech share index peaks at 5,048.62. By the end of 2002 the index has fallen to 1,114.11 - and AOL/Time Warner posts a loss of $99bn. Time Warner drops AOL from its name the following year.
* The “I Love You” worm becomes the costliest in the history of the internet.
* Popbitch celebrity gossip website launches.
* The scientist Laurence Godfrey wins £15,000 in damages from Demon Internet for failing to remove “squalid, obscene and defamatory” remarks about him.
* Lastminute.com is valued at £800m on flotation.
2001: PORN, WORMS & VIRUSES
The web’s dark side asserts itself. Following the spread of the VBS/Loveletter internet worm in 2001, a spate of other worms are released including Sircam, CodeRed and Klez. Meanwhile, an FBI investigation into pedophile websites identifies 250,000 suspected users, including 7,200 in the UK. More than 1,200 people are arrested. Today there are 4.2 million pornographic websites - 12 per cent of all sites.
* Napster is banned from distributing copyrighted music.
* Apple launches the iPod.
* Microsoft launches Windows XP operating system, with its built-in support for wireless networking.
* Wikipedia starts.
* BlackBerry launches in Europe.
* Taliban bans internet use in Afghanistan.
2002: ONLINE RELATIONSHIPS
Friends Reunited began reconnecting old school friends in 2000, growing from 3,000 members in its first year to 4 million at the start of 2002. Meanwhile, a new generation of social websites including Friendster.com and EveryonesConnected.com develops the theme. Today there are more than 300 such sites, including Google’s invitation-only service, Orkut.
* Video of the murder of Daniel Pearl is shown online.
* Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market reaches 96 per cent.
* Internet’s global “population” reaches 428 million.
*Apple sells its millionth iPod.
2003: SOUND & PICTURES
Apple launches the iTunes Music Store, selling 20 million copy-protected tracks in seven months. Microsoft’s response - the MSN Music Store - isn’t ready until 2004, but research firm Forrester predicts that by 2008 one third of all music sales will be made online. Digital cameras outsell film cameras in the US for the first time.
* Kazaa, a file-sharing program, becomes the most downloaded software ever.
* Howard Dean’s internet-based presidential campaign threatens to revolutionise US politics (left).
* Wireless hotspots take off, freeing internet users from their desks. BT promises to establish 4,000 such hotspots across the UK by the summer of 2004.
* Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 people for distributing copyright music files over the internet.
2004: YEAR OF THE BLOG
Although the term “weblog” was coined in 1997, 2004 is the year the blog achieves critical mass. Salam Pax, the “Baghdad blogger”, becomes popular - offering a unique insight into life for ordinary citizens during the Iraq war. AOL begins to include blogging tools in the latest versions of its software, while Microsoft launches its MSN Spaces blogging service. Today there are an estimated 14.7 million blogs, with a new one created every 7.4 seconds.
* Google goes public for $1.7bn.
* Cherie Blair is noticed using eBay.
* MyDoom worm becomes internet’s worst-ever virus.
* US film industry serves lawsuits against sites hosting BitTorrent-based files.
* The global online population reaches 934 million.
2005: ONLINE NEWS
Citizen journalists are now appearing daily, not just on the big news sites. Nowpublic.com and Scoopt.com offer people the chance to be photojournalists, while podcasting (a grassroots internet radio movement akin to audio blogging) is hugely popular after just one year. A report by the Carnegie Corporation shows that 18- to 34-year-olds in the US are twice as likely to use an internet portal as a printed newspaper for daily news.
* Skype Internet telephony service handles its ten billionth minute of voice conversation.
* Fraudsters send 19.2 million “phishing” e-mails in July alone.
* More than half of British internet subscriptions are through broadband.
* 87 per cent of the world’s e-mail is spam.
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Thank you to Belfast Telegraph and Danny Bradbury for this incredible compilation.
Our Qustion to you: What moments do you remember most?
Mikey says:
Ahh, the joys of visiting fun days past. As I sit here in the Mountain Dew Laboratory of Doom,(right next to the area known as the Laundry room of Doom wherein the Washing Machine and Dryer of DOOM are located)(It plays DOOM) I’m greatly reminded of how very little I have moved during these last few years. I’ve essentially been frozen in place in viewing the awe inspiring splendor that the internets has become. And although the list of interesting things to do is huge, I am astounded by how little of this information is actually useful. Almost everything you can access has been created by an individual with an eye towards gaining -something- for the exchange of that infomation. Say, for instance that I make a web log, and you read it and responded with comments. There’s no factual guarantee to my stories authenticity, but as we all know, a huge number of people will believe anything they have read as being 100% true. And therein lies the problem. There is NO standard of journalism that applies to the web. You can actually make news, if that be your desire. Go look at the Onion. But where do we draw that line? How do you debunk fraud, when all you see is answering commentary by bystanders. How do you effect change without destroying the effort? What do we do next? Perhaps we need a sort of Verisign certificate for the average web user. Charge a fee to create the organization that will license the ability to report on the mundane. You gotta be factual and truthful -and- your facts will be checked.
AHA!! A drivers license for the internet. Or a learners permit, or a license with various levels of skillsets?
You’d have to demonstrate responsibile surfing, avoidance of viral replication, how to spot scams and stop or prevent unrequested active-x control downloads. In short, how to behave on the internet. And for all those naysayers that state “this’ll never do” we start by issuing the controls to the isp’s. WE WILL NOT CONNECT PEOPLE UP TO THE INTERNET UNLESS THEY ARE ABLE TO PROVE PROFICIENCY. No matter how much money they have.
And tied directly to the individual, with a license showing for all to inspect. Forget the fingerprint scanner, give em all a 128Mb USB drive with all their info encoded with a very very large encription algorithm.
Actually this kind of sounds like a good idea. Until you factor in those ISP’s who tell their customers that “user privacy is a huge concern and the ISP will never divulge the ID of any user”. I’m talking about making that ID known to ALL as a prequisite to even logging onto the internet…….anyone who wants to track the original poster, they can. Anonymous posters, GOODBYE.
Just a little musing here, don’t become alarmed….
August 13th, 2005 at 9:10 am
John says:
Sometime in the last few years the amount paid worldwide
for inkjet refills passed the amount spent for
NEW computers. Anyone know the exact year?
John
August 13th, 2005 at 10:06 am
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
Special Report: 10 Years on the Web, a Look Back at Major Milestones
I started working online in 1995, back when people were calling the Internet the “Information superhighway” and asking questions like “who owns the Internet?” (I actually overheard that exact question at a party from a now very high up person who w…
August 13th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Mikey says:
Sorry about being so verbose in the post above.
I do go on a bit. Won’t happen again.
August 13th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
Alice says:
Are you kidding? I loved what you wrote. Don;t ever edit good comments. That was fantastic!
–Alice
August 13th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Mikey says:
I’m touched. I really am. I didn’t know my ramblings were that good. I’ve only recently started to reply to posters that attracted my interest, and your (well, Bills too, I guess) tongue-in-cheek style has always enlightened and amused me.
The Pepsi-Cola Laboratory of DOOM has been a long time fav, something about a corporate sponsored secret world domination headquarters strikes me as insanely funny.
Keep up the good work.
August 14th, 2005 at 8:29 am
dew says:
Wow. Trip down memory lane. I started with the “Internet” first I first started college, in August 1994. First thing I learned about was e-mail and I remember that my University at the time gave users really awful usernames along the lines of vp24vxy25@blah.uni on a VAX/VMS system. The second thing I remember poking around with was IRC (Internet Relay Chat). To this day, I am still a regular using IRC. Eventually I heard about gopher, newsgroups, where I spent a lot of time reading up on video game news, rumors and participating in system advovacy. Somewhere around that time, my university was also giving out Unix accounts instead of VAX accounts. I was one of the earlier, but definitely not the first, to request for an account on the nice Solaris systems. One day while I was chatting on IRC, told me to see if I have something called “mosaic” available. He even told me to go to what’s called an X-terminal to try it out. I did, and he showed me his homepage. I was pretty amazed to see his site. I soon tried making my own homepage by copying other people’s code here and there. They looked awful and to this day, I still haven’t improved on that.
I have memories of all my friends having webpages or trying to make one. Soon after, Netscape came rolling in as the browser that lets you read the text of a webpage while the images load. I forgot the term that was used for that, but I remember it was a big thing that Mosaic did not do. I remember hearing about Yahoo being a research project and it has a very long URL. I remember that Altavista was my choice search engine, until Google came along. I was a die-hard Netscape user up and until 2001, where I was forced to use IE because of how the Netscape browser just literally stunk. I remember how one of my professors saying how the Internet will go completely commercialized and that was about a year before the dotcom rise began. I saw it as a passing phase, but I didn’t take advantage of it myself, which might’ve been a loss for me, but maybe not; we are still recovering from the crash. I remember Geocities, pre-Yahoo, offering accounts for webspace and tons and tons of people signing up for them, for a few megabytes of webspace. I remember my old Hotmail email username. I have memories of wrestling with free dial up Internet services. Tritium’s free service anyone? I remember paying 14$ for 1 hour of Internet access in a cafe when I was not able to get Internet access at home on a pinch. I remember the rise of spam, first in newsgroups, then email and I remember how it was initially pretty easy to ignore. Hell, half of them were from “friends”. I think I have too many I remembers, but yes, it’s a great ride and I am still on it. Keep it coming!
August 15th, 2005 at 7:42 am
digital wilderness says:
10 Years on the Web, a Look Back at Major Milestones
Real Tech News take a look back at major milestones of the last 10 Years on the Web.
Good trip down memory lane, including the browser wars (remember when Netscape had 87% of the market, with IE only at 4%?), the rise of Yahoo, Google, eBay and Napst…
August 15th, 2005 at 11:22 am
dew says:
Hmm. Slightly off topic, but what are all these trackback comments?
August 15th, 2005 at 1:45 pm