Internet History Timeline

I start the class with a blank timeline that stretches across the length of the chalkboard.  
I handout about 20 note cards with a year written on the front.  The years begin with 1957 (the launching of Sputnik) to the present.  Under the year I have written important events in the history of the Internet.  Some years have more than one card.  
In addition, some cards have important vocabulary words on them which are underlined.  The definitions for the words are on the back of the card.  I pass out the cards to students one at a time and let them take over from there. 

Students are instructed to determine where the years begin.  When the student with the earliest year is identified, he is to put his year on the timeline, read the event on the back of the card to the class, and write a word or two on the board under the year to remind students of the occurrence.  Students work their way around the room – they have to be alert because some years are used more than once.  

When they are done, we have a visual depiction of the history of the Internet.  Of course, I do not make them remember all 20 or so dates!  After the exercise, we discuss as a class the most important events, circle them, and they record those in their notebooks.  The dates and cards are as follows:
 

• 1957  USSR launches Sputnik (first artificial earth satellite)
• 1960 ARPA (an acronym for Advanced Research Project Agency) forms to establish US’s lead in science and technology applicable to the military
• 1962 RAND Corporation (a gov’t agency) releases the idea of a packet switched network
• 1969  Physical network called ARPANET is constructed linking 4 hosts
• 1972  First e-mail program created and 1st message sent via ARPANET
• 1973  ARPANET’s first International connections are made with England and Norway
• 1979  USENET is created at UNC – users from all over the world join these discussion groups to talk about the net, politics, religion, etc
• 1982  First use of the term Internet
• 1983  Domain Name System created allowing packets to be transmitted to a domain name which is translated by a server into the IP address/number of each computer (so people do not have to remember numbers to send messages)
• 1983  TCP/IP becomes the core Internet protocol replacing NCP completely
• 1984  The NSF (National Science Foundation) unofficially takes over guiding the growth of the Internet
• 1988  “Internet Worm”  the 1st malicious program temporarily disables 6,000 of 60.000 hosts
• 1990  WWW released by CERN (its creator)   and
• More than 1,000,000 hosts are connected to the Internet
• 1991  Gopher released to ease campus communications (first point and click way of navigating files online)  It is distributed for free on the Internet.
• 1992  Internet Society is chartered to take control of the Internet from NSF
• 1993  Mosaic, the first graphics based browser becomes available
• 1993  NSF releases control of Internet to private sector, leaving InterNIC to provide some specific services  and  the Web is opened for commercial use   and   Over 100 countries are connected
• 1994  Pizza Hut establishes a web page allowing customers to order pizza online
• 1995  Java is released   and   Users in almost 150 countries are connected to the Internet   and   more than 3,000,000 hosts exist

Ashley Phillips
Hickory High School
Chesapeake VA