From the 1945 vision of the Memex to today's AI search
When a computer filled an entire room, a few people imagined a world where knowledge was linked together and computers talked to one another.
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think."
Bush, who had directed American scientific research during the war, imagined a desk-sized machine that held every document and let you follow "associative trails" from one to the next. It is the oldest blueprint for hypertext.
J.C.R. Licklider pictures a future of connected computers.
At the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Licklider envisioned an "intergalactic network" where anyone, anywhere, could reach a computer and share data and programs. His successors made the vision real as ARPANET.
Chop a message into pieces and let each find its own way.
In the US, Paul Baran was designing a network that could survive a nuclear attack, while in Britain Donald Davies wanted an efficient network for computers. Each arrived at the same answer: split data into small packets, send them separately and reassemble them at the destination.
Ted Nelson and nonlinear writing.
Nelson gave the name "hypertext" to writing that readers can move through freely by following links. His lifelong Xanadu project was never finished, but the word lives on in the web's HTML and HTTP.
The internet's ancestor sends its first message.
On October 29, UCLA tried to send "LOGIN" to the Stanford Research Institute, but the system crashed after "LO." By the end of the year, four sites were connected.
As more computers joined, common rules were needed to link different networks. And people began writing letters over the network.
Ray Tomlinson sends a message to another computer.
Messages had only passed between users on the same machine. To send them across the network, Tomlinson picked the "@" key to separate the user from the computer name. Email soon made up most of ARPANET's traffic.
Connecting the computers in an office.
At Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe built a local area network that linked many computers over a single cable. It is still the standard for wired networks.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn design a network of networks.
They designed protocols that joined networks of different kinds into one. The idea that any network following these rules could connect gave us the word "internet," short for inter-network.
A computer ad mailed to hundreds of people.
A DEC marketer emailed a new product announcement to hundreds of ARPANET users at once and drew fierce complaints. It reportedly did help sales.
The original topic-based discussion board.
University computers linked over phone lines let people post and reply in topic-based "newsgroups." Internet culture, from online communities to FAQs and emoticons, grew up here.
With the switch to TCP/IP, the internet was truly born. It also suffered its first major security incident.
On January 1, ARPANET switches to TCP/IP.
Every computer using the old protocol switched to TCP/IP on this day, which many consider the internet's official birthday.
Names instead of numbers.
As the Domain Name System (DNS), designed in 1983, took hold, people could find computers by name rather than by numeric IP address. In March 1985 the first .com domain, symbolics.com, was registered.
The first large-scale malware to cripple the internet.
A worm released by graduate student Robert Morris copied itself far faster than he intended, slowing or stopping a large share of the computers then on the internet. The incident led to the first Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).
Tim Berners-Lee: "Vague but exciting."
At CERN, Berners-Lee proposed linking the lab's scattered documents with hypertext. His boss returned it with "vague but exciting" written on the cover.
The web, where anyone could publish documents and link them together, opened to the public, followed by the browser wars and the dot-com boom. The way music and other content reached people was shaken too.
The first website opens to the world.
Berners-Lee created HTML, HTTP and URLs, along with the first web server and browser, and opened the web to outside users in August. The first website was a page explaining what the web was.
A browser with pictures, and a free web.
The Mosaic browser, which showed text and images on the same page, made the number of web users explode. The same year CERN made web technology available for anyone to use, royalty-free.
A browser company, a web directory and an online bookstore.
Netscape Navigator, built by Mosaic's developers, took over the market, while Yahoo!, a list of websites started by Stanford graduate students, and Jeff Bezos's online bookstore Amazon both got their start. The W3C, which manages web standards, opened the same year.
A language built in ten days, and Internet Explorer.
Netscape's Brendan Eich created JavaScript, which brought web pages to life, in ten days. The same year Microsoft released Internet Explorer, starting the first browser war, and SSL encryption and the auction site eBay arrived.
Separating content from design.
The W3C published CSS as a standard for defining how web pages look. Before that, changing even the color of text meant piling on HTML tags.
Ranking search results by links.
Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin greatly improved search with PageRank, which treats a page as more important the more links it receives, especially from other important pages.
Sharing music files directly between people.
College student Shawn Fanning's peer-to-peer music-sharing service was used by tens of millions and shook the record industry before lawsuits shut it down. The debate over how digital content should be distributed began in earnest.
After the dot-com bubble burst, the companies that survived opened Web 2.0. Users posted their own writing, photos and videos, and web pages began to behave like apps.
Stocks that rose on a ".com" in the name collapse.
After peaking in March, the Nasdaq fell to about a quarter of its high within two years, and countless internet companies vanished. Survivors such as Amazon, eBay and Google went on to dominate the web.
An encyclopedia anyone can edit.
An encyclopedia written by crowds of volunteers rather than experts was laughed at at first, but it soon became the most-read reference work in the world.
A web that connects people, and a free 1 GB inbox.
Facebook, started in a Harvard dorm, opened the age of social networks. Gmail, announced on April Fools' Day with a then-astonishing 1 GB of storage, was taken by many for a joke. The same year the term "Web 2.0" spread to describe a web built on user participation.
Everyone a broadcaster, and a web without reloads.
YouTube made video sharing mainstream, and the technique of exchanging data without reloading the page got a name: Ajax. Google Maps, which you could drag around, was its showcase.
A real-time web in 140 characters, and servers for rent.
Twitter arrived for sharing short posts in real time, and Amazon launched AWS to rent out servers and storage. Now even a small team could build a global service without owning servers.
A browser rebuilt from scratch for the web.
Google's Chrome ran each tab separately and introduced V8, a fast JavaScript engine, dramatically speeding up web apps. The next year Node.js brought V8 to the server, and JavaScript became the language of the whole web.
The web moved beyond the browser into smartphone apps, and a handful of giant platforms came to occupy most of the internet. Security and privacy became major issues.
Social media in a single photo, and free messaging.
Instagram, which began as an iPhone photo app, opened the era of image-centered social media, and free mobile messengers like WhatsApp quickly replaced text messages.
Building screens from components.
React, released by Facebook, popularized splitting a web interface into small components and redrawing only what changes when the data does. It became the standard tool for front-end development.
Video, graphics and apps without plug-ins.
The W3C published HTML5 as an official standard. Video, audio and graphics could now run in the browser alone, without plug-ins like Flash.
Free HTTPS for everyone.
A service that issues the certificates needed to encrypt websites automatically and for free made HTTPS the default rather than the exception.
The web's main audience changes.
For the first time, mobile devices accounted for more of the world's web traffic than desktops. Websites are now designed for the small screen first.
Near-native speed in the browser.
All major browsers began supporting WebAssembly. Programs written in C++ or Rust could now run fast on the web, bringing games, video editors and design tools into the browser.
Personal data belongs to the user.
As the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation took effect, consent pop-ups appeared on websites around the world. It became the international benchmark for handling personal data.
The pandemic moved daily life online, and old web technologies retired. Then AI began reading the web, summarizing it and browsing it on people's behalf.
Everything goes online, and an era exits.
COVID-19 moved classes, meetings and shopping onto video calls and the web all at once. On the last day of the year, Adobe Flash, once the engine of web animation and games, reached its official end of support.
A new transport for the web, and a farewell after 27 years.
HTTP/3, which runs on the UDP-based QUIC protocol, became a standard, and in June Internet Explorer reached its official end of support.
A web where you ask instead of search.
Released in November, ChatGPT passed 100 million users in two months. Asking an AI and getting an answer, instead of digging through a list of links, began to change how people use the web.
Conversational AI comes to the search box.
Microsoft challenged Google by adding conversational AI to Bing, and the next year Google began showing AI summaries at the top of its results. As people got answers without clicking, the traffic that websites depend on was shaken.
Demanding that giant platforms open their doors.
As the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) took full effect, "gatekeeper" companies such as Apple, Google and Meta had to open their platforms, for example by allowing other app stores and browsers.
AI that clicks and types for you.
Agent features that let AI operate a browser directly, searching, filling in forms and making bookings, arrived in major AI services and browsers. The web began to be designed not only for people but for AI as well.