1957
On October 4, 1957 the then Soviet Union successfully launched a space station. This space station was called Sputnik I and was the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik I was about the size of a beach ball and only took 98 minutes to make one full orbit around earth. This Soviet Union advancement pushed the United States into researching new technology for their country, and on January 31, 1958 the United States launched their first satellite, Explorer I.1962
In 1962, J.C.R Licklider, a scientist from M.I.T and ARPA, proposed a solution for easy long distance communication. This solution was known as a “galactic network” and would allow for computers to essentially talk to each other.1965
In 1965 another M.I.T scientist created a process called “packet switching”. This process allowed computers to send information back and forth to each other by breaking the data down into blocks before sending it to its destination.1969
In 1969 ARPAnet delivered the first computer to computer message. This type of communication was called “node-to-node” communication. The two communicating computers were located at UCLA and Stanford, respectively, and each computer was the size of a small house. The message that was delivered was “LOGIN”, but only the first two letters were received by Stanford before the network crashed.
1991
In 1991, a computer programer in Switzerland by the name of Tim Berners-Lee changed the world yet again. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This invention was not just a way for people to quickly send files from place to place, it gave them a place to retrieve any type of information they wanted.
1992
In 1992 a group of researchers at the University of Illinois created a browser called Mosaic. Mosaic would later be called Netscape, and was a easy way for users to search the web. For the first time it allowed users to see words and pictures on the same screen and to navigate using scrollbars and links. In 1992, Congress also decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes.
1998
On September 4, 1998 the web browser Google was released. This new browser had about 60 millions pages available for viewing by the end of 1998 and had better and faster results than those of their competitors. Now, Google is one of the most used browsers and has many more uses than just surfing the internet.
2002
On September 23, 2002, four years after the release of Google, another web browser was released. This one was called Mozilla Firefox, but was originally known as Phoenix. It was created by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross who were all engineers working in the experimental branch of the Mozilla Project. Nowadays, Firefox is a free-open source and culminates between 12% and 22% of worldwide usage.
2004
In 2004, one of the world’s most used social networking sites was created. On February 4, 2004 Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg, who at the time was an undergrad at Harvard University. Initially Facebook was only used by college students in Ivy League schools but by 2009 was the most used social networking system worldwide. Now in 2014, Facebook has a around 1.23 billion active users and the company has risen over $134 billion.
2006
On July 15, 2006 another great social networking site was released to the public. Twitter was created by employees at the podcasting company Odeo. Twitter was a way for people to send and read short messages of about 140 characters from people all around the world. Originally Twitter started off with about 20,000 tweets per day, moved up to around 400,000 tweets and now has around 400 million tweets per day with around 200 million active users.
