1969 US Dept of Defense employ Defense Contractors Bolt Beranek and Newman to build and provide ongoing support for the first computer packet-switching network running between the Stanford Research Institute near San Francisco and the research departments at the Universities of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Utah. The network is called the ARPANET - from the words Advanced Research Projects Agency.
1971 Bolt Beranek and Newman establish the Email program using the protocol Username @ Hostname
1973 Forty mainframe hosts now connected to the ARPANET (including satellite links to London and Norway), with all Hostnames registered at Stanford. Jon Postel, researcher at the University of Los Angeles, begins an RFC — Request for Comments — Editor to document each Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port, and Internet Protocol (IP) address. Moves to University of Southern California in 1977 where he initiates IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — today the central co-ordination function for the Internet.
1980. IP version 4 protocol is released which allows for up to 4 billion individual IP addresses
1983 University of Berkeley release a standard version of Unix with these TCP / IP protocols. US Dept of Defense have now made them mandatory on every host. Numerous defense contractor networks and other university networks establish gateways via these protocols to the ARPANET / CSNET. Unrelated commercial use strictly forbidden. The ARPANET continues to be administered by Bolt Beranek and Newman under contract to the Defense Data Network - Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at Stanford, and the CSNET by the National Science Foundation. Now being called the Internet — from internetworking — connecting networks regardless of their different individual protocols to these network backbones and thus indirectly to each other.
1985 Domain Name System introduced to simplify the sending of email which is now the major application on the Internet. Each computer's Hostname now includes a domain name. Information on a Hostname's associated IP address now stored within each computer network's Name
1986 With the introduction of Country Code Top Level Domains, this registry system is significantly decentralized. Melbourne University in Australia given responsibility by the DDN-NIC for overseeing registrations in the .au domain.
1991 Network Solutions (a private company) takes over responsibility for TLD registrations from the DDN-NIC.
1992 Tim Berners-Lee at CERN - a Particle Physics Research Laboratory in Geneva - demonstrates his WorldWideWeb browser program communicating via HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocols) with a computer database at Stanford that was running his web server program. The simplicity and effectiveness of his protocols for "surfing" the Internet and exchanging information results in a rapid uptake of his technology and the World Wide Web is born.
1993. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), who had been providing Internet funding to the universities, and had in 1985-86 created a third high speed backbone linking several national supercomputer centres in the US for the purposes of scientific research, now in 1993 take over responsibility for the Internet from the Dept of Defense. Private companies are becoming involved everywhere.
This same year, IANA issues the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) with an initial 4 million IP addresses to allow it to become a regional IP address registry, using volunteer labour and donated facilities from a number of countries. Initially based in Tokyo, it now operates out of Brisbane, Australia, with the four major Internet Service Provider (ISP) members in Australia being Telstra, Optus, Connect (now owned by AAPT), and Ozemail (now iiNet).
1995-1996. The National Science Foundation discontinues direct access to the NSF backbone on April 30, 1995. It contracts with independent ISPs, including AT&T, Sprint, UUNet and others to provide a backbone that will interconnect with each other on a settlement free basis i.e. no fees charged by the receiving network. Known as peering.
1998. US Dept of Commerce takes over responsibility for the Internet from the NSF. They appoint ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) - a non-profit public/private partnership at the University of Southern California to have ongoing oversight. ICANN appoints firstly Network Solutions and then Verisign who purchased Network Solutions in 2000 to be responsible for the root zone file - which establishes the organizations responsible for the TLD registries - currently there are 280. Verisign also retains responsibility for the .com and .net TLD registries.
2000. The Southern Cross Cable - a network of trans-Pacific telecommunications cables between Sydney, New Zealand, and California - is built and supported by Telecom New Zealand (AAPT) - 50%, Singtel (Optus) - 40%, Verizon - 10%. Overseas transmission costs - previously by satellite - drops by a factor of twenty-five - i.e. from 25 cents per megabyte to one cent (and less) per megabyte. Telstra subsequently invests heavily in the Australia-Japan Cable - it becomes operational in 2001.
2008. There are now about 150 million domain names, with the .com domain registry - administered by Verisign - containing about 70 million names. The .cn domain - administered by CNNIC - is about 10 million names, and the .au domain - administered by Australian Government appointee AuDA - is about one million names. These figures are fairly rough estimates.
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