Internet & Networking Timeline

By the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 BCE) the Persian Royal Road ran some 2,857 km from the city of Susa on the lower Tigris to the port of Smyrna (modern Izmir in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea.  A highway built by the Persian king of kings Darius I to facilitate rapid communication and intelligence gathering throughout the Persian Empire,  the Royal Road was protected by Persian rulers and later used by the Romans. On this road couriers, riding in relays, could travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) in seven or nine days.

Herodotus wrote:

“There is nothing that travels faster, and yet is mortal, than these couriers; the Persians invented this system, which works as follows. It is said that there are as many horses and men posted at intervals as there are days required for the entire journey, so that one horse and one man are assigned to each day. And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible. The first courier passes on the instructions to the second, the second to the third, and from there they are transmitted from one to another all the way through, just as the torchbearing relay is celebrated by the Hellenes in honor of Hephaistos. The Persians call this horse-posting system the angareion" (Strassler [ed] The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories [2007] 8.98, p. 642). 

By having fresh horses and riders ready at each relay, royal couriers may have carried messages the entire distance in 7 to 9 days, though normal travelers, or an army on foot, might have taken about three months. This Royal Road linked into many other routes in the overall trade network known as the Silk Road. Some of these roads, such as the routes to India and Central Asia, were also protected, encouraging regular contact between India, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. There are accounts in the Old Testament Book of Esther of dispatches being sent from Susa to provinces as far out as India and Cush (Kush) during the reign of Xerxes (485-465 BCE).

"The postal system during the reign of Xerxes I is also described in the Biblical Book of Esther. While the historical details of the Book of Esther are difficult to verify, it would appear that a swift messenger system connecting all provinces of the Persian Empire was at the disposal of the ruler. In this case, the system was used not to gather information about provincial affairs but to send royal decrees throughout the realm. Thus, when Hāmān secured the King’s permission to kill the Jews of the empire, ‘Letters were sent by courier to all the King’s provinces with orders to destroy, slay and exterminate all Jews’ (Esther 3: 13). When, through the efforts of Mordecai and Esther, the King agreed to spare the Jews, ‘Letters were sent by mounted couriers riding on horses from the royal stable. By these letters the King granted permission to the Jews in every city to unite and defend themselves …’ (8: 10); thus ‘the couriers, mounted on their royal horses, were despatched post-haste at the King’s urgent command; and the decree was issued also in Susa the capital’ (8: 14).

"In this case, the Achaemenid postal system was employed to circulate royal decrees throughout the provinces of the empire, using riders ‘on horses from the royal stable’. The English translation of these verses is deceptively readable and cannot be seen as loyal to the complexities of the original Hebrew text. For instance, the term aḥashtranīm (Esther 8: 10, 14) used to describe the royal mounts has conveniently been ignored in the English version. In fact, this word is a hapax legomenon and has generated exegetical controversy" (Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Islamic World [2007] http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521858687&ss=exc, accessed 01-14-2010).

Until the development of effective optical telegraph systems at the end of the 18th century, messengers on horseback, riding over a good road system, remained the fastest method of sending a message overland.

According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Aeneas Tacticus, one of the earliest Greek writers on the art of war, invented the hydraulic telegraph about this time. It was a semaphore system used during the First Punic War to send messages between Sicily and Carthage.

"The system involved identical containers on separate hills; each container would be filled with water, and a vertical rod floated within. The rods were inscribed with various predetermined codes.

"To send a message, the sending operator would use a torch to signal the receiving operator; once the two were synchronized, they would simultaneously open the spigots at the bottom of their containers. Water would drain out until the water level reached the desired code, at which point the sender would lower his torch, and the operators would simultaneously close their spigots."

The emperor Augustus created the Cursus publicus, the courier service of the Roman empire, to transport messages, officials, and tax revenues from one province to another.

Though Augustus based the Roman system on the Persian model of relay riders passing a message from one courier to the next, he switched to a system in which one man made the entire journey carrying the message. This had the advantage of enabling the messenger to be questioned regarding additional information, and it may have provided additional security.  However, it also slowed down the speed of communication.

Various authorities have estimated that the average speed of a messenger over the Roman road system was about 50 miles per day—a substantial reduction in speed from the relay methods used by the Persian Empire. The riders may have used light carriages called rhedæ with fast horses. Additionally, there was another slower service equipped with two-wheeled carts (birolæ) pulled by oxen. This slower service was reserved for government correspondence.

It has also been estimated from surviving accounts of Roman voyages that the fastest Roman ships sailed at five knots or 120 miles per day in good weather, and two knots or 50 miles per day in unfavorable weather.

In 1736 Swiss German mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler, working at the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, published "Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis," Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae 8 (1736) 128-40. This negative solution to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem represented the beginning of graph theory, topology and network science.

An extended English translation of Euler's paper appeared in Biggs, Lloyd & Wilson, Graph Theory 1736-1936 (1977) 1-20.

Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (2011) 74-75.

On March 2, 1791 inventor Claude Chappe sent his brother the first transmission over their optical telegraph: “si vous reussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory). The initial experimental line ran between Brulon and Parcé.

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeded in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph. 

The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria, and communicated  news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

"The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes. Paris to Strasbourg with 50 stations was the next line and others followed soon after."

Chappe's system was the first widely adopted system to transmit messages overland faster than a messager or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. 

"In the Chappe system messages were encrypted and translated by semaphore signals built on the tops of towers miles apart. A telegrapher in the next tower would read the semaphore signals through a telescope and retransmit the message to the following tower. This process would be repeated, with error-correction checks in place at each repetition, until the message reached the end of the line. Because optical telegraph systems using semaphores required that messages be continually restransmitted from tower to tower, there was no fail-safe way to eliminate error. Furthermore it was necessary to encrypt all messages so that the operators would not be privy to secret information. Thus only the directors of the system and the inspectors were allowed to know the code for message signals. The two operators in each signaling tower knew only the limited set of control codes used for error correction, clock synchronizations, etc. The actual codes were written in codebooks. Claude Chappe's 1795 codebook had 8,940 words and phrases. By 1799 he had added four supplementary codebooks with additional words and phrases, and names of places and people. Thus each message had to include a citation of the code book employed" (Norman, From Gutenberg to the Internet [2005] 174).

"All signals on the semphore telegraph were passed one at a time, in strictly synchronus fashion. The operators were required to check [by telescope] their neighboring stations every few minutes for new signals, and reproduce them as quickly as possible. The operator then had to verify that the next station inline reproduced the signal correctly, and set an error signal if it failed to do so. Each symbol had to be recorded in a logbook, as soon as it was carried to completion. Since no symbolic or numeric code system for representing the semaphore positions was described this was done in the form of little pictograms. . . " (Hotzmann & Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks [1995] 87).

The Chappe optical telegraph eventually covered France with "a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres." It was be used for military and national communications until the 1850s.

"By 1824, the Chappe brothers were promoting the semaphore lines for commercial use, especially to transmit the costs of commodities. Napoleon Bonaparte saw the military advantage in being able to transmit information between locations, and carried a portable semaphore with his headquarters. This allowed him to coordinate forces and logistics over longer distances than any other army of his time. However because stations had to be within sight of each other, and because the efficient operation of the network required well trained and disciplined operators, the costs of administration and wages were a continuous source of financial difficulties."

On September 27, 1825 British engineer George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1 (originally named Active), the first steam engine to carry passengers and freight on a regular basis, hawled its first train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR). The S&DR was the first publically subscribed passenger railroad.

"It was 26 miles (40 km) long and was built in north-eastern England between Witton Park and Stockton-on-Tees via Darlington and connected to several collieries near Shildon. Planned to carry both goods and passengers, the line was initially built to connect inland coal mines to Stockton, where coal was to be loaded onto sea-going boats. Much of its route is now served by the Tees Valley Line, operated by Northern Rail. It was also the longest railway at the time" (Wikipedia article on Stockton and Darlington Railway, accessed 02-01-2012).

About the same time as the S&DR opened for business British engineer Thomas Tredgold issued  A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads and Carriages, Shewing the Principles of Estimating their Strength, Proportions, Expense, and Annual Produce . . . (1825), and British colliery and steam locomotive engineer Nicholas Wood issued A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads and Interior Communication in General, with Original Experiments, and Tables of the Comparative Value of Canals and Rail-Roads (1825).  These books, both of which were published in London, were the first comprehensive works on railway engineering.

Dibner, Heralds of Science (1980) No. 182.

On May 24, 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse transmitted the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that became standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It was “What hath God wrought?” The recipient of Morse's message was Morse's associate in developing the telegraph, machinist and inventor Alfred Vail. 

Vail, who had worked with Morse since September 1837, expanded Morse's original experimental numeric code based on a optical telegraph codes, to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail determined the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shorter sequences of dots and dashes. Vail was thus responsible for inventing the most useful and efficient features of the Morse Code.

The Morse Code became the first widely used data code.

Probably the first publication of the Morse Code was in Vail's Description of the American ElectroMagnetic Telegraph: Now in Operation between the Cities of Washington and Baltimore (1845). Vail issued two versions of this in 1845: a 24-page pamphlet, which was probably the first, and a much-expanded 208-page book.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace  (2002) no. 208.

On November 1, 1848 the first WH Smith railway bookstall opened in Euston Station, London.

Railroad transportation and railroad stations provided a whole new market for printing, publishing, and bookselling. Inexpensive novels or "Yellowbacks" were published to supply a wider range of society. It became a common practice to publish novels in weekly, fortnightly or monthly parts to spread the cost.

Paul Julius Reuter (originally named Israel Beer Josaphat) set up an information service, later called Reuters, using a "fleet of 45 carrier pigeons", to deliver news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, terminal points of the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines.

Reuter's pigeons carried the messages between Brussels and Aachen within two hours, beating the railroad by six hours.

In 1852 a cable laid by the Submarine Telegraph Company linked London to Paris.

Reuters opened offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

The Pony Express, a fast mail service crossing the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California was operational for little more than one year. Carrying messages by horseback riders in relays to stations across the prairies, plains, deserts and mountains of the western United States, it reduced the transit time for messages between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts to about 10 days, with telegraphic communication covering about half the distance and couriers on horseback covering the rest.

"In 1860 there were about 157 Pony Express stations that were about 10 miles (16 km) apart along the Pony Express route. This was roughly the distance a horse could travel at a gallop before tiring. At each station stop the express rider would change to a fresh horse, taking only the mail pouch called a mochila (from the Spanish for pouch or backpack) with him. The employers stressed the importance of the pouch. They often said that, if it came to be, the horse and rider should perish before the mochila did. The mochila was thrown over the saddle and held in place by the weight of the rider sitting on it. Each corner had a cantina, or pocket. Bundles of mail were placed in these cantinas, which were padlocked for safety. The mochila could hold 20 pounds (10 kg) of mail along with the 20 pounds of material carried on the horse. Included in that 20 pounds were a water sack, a Bible, a horn for alerting the relay station master to prepare the next horse, a revolver, and a choice of a rifle or another revolver.  Eventually, everything except one revolver and a water sack was removed, allowing for a total of 165 pounds (75 kg) on the horse's back. Riders, who could not weigh over 125 pounds, changed about every 75–100 miles (120–160 km), and rode day and night. In emergencies, a given rider might ride two stages back to back, over 20 hours on a quickly moving horse.

"It is unknown if riders tried crossing the Sierra Nevada in winter, but they certainly crossed central Nevada. By 1860 there was a telegraph station in Carson City, Nevada. The riders received $25 per week as pay. A comparable wage for unskilled labor at the time was about $1 per week" (Wikipedia article on Pony Express, accessed 12-24-2010).

Completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line on October 24, 1861 made the Pony Express obsolete, and it shut down two days later.  Remarkably, this legendary U.S. mail service existed for only one year and seven months!

The U.S. Federal Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860, passed June 16, 1860 to subsidize a telegraph line that would complete telegraphic communication between the east and west coast of the United States, incorporated one of the earliest statements of network neutrality: 

"messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority. . ." (Wikipedia article on Network neutrality, accessed 12-24-2010).

The first transcontinental telegraph line connected New York and San Francisco.  As a result of the completion of this line, the Pony Express was immediately obsolete, and it ceased operations two days later.

The single overland telegraph line was operated until 1869, when it was replaced by a multi-line telegraph that had been constructed alongside the route of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable was undertaken. The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

On July 27, 1866, roughly ten years after the project began, the Great Eastern laid the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland, with the Telegraph Field (also known as Longitude Field) Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, in western Ireland.  Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established on a permanent basis. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

In 1901 German scientist, philosopher and science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz at Gotha, Germany published a story entitled Die Universalbibliothek, describing a library which was universal in the sense that it not only contained all existing written works, but all possible written works.

"In 1901 Kurd Lasswitz wrote a short story, 'The Universal Library,' elaborated upon by Jorge Luis Borges as 'The Library of Babel' in 1941. 'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness,' Borges explained. 'All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose solution did not exist.' Borges described the library in magical tones, whereas Lasswitz, a mathematician as well as a philosopher, got down to practical details. 'You say that everything will be in the library? The complete works of Goethe? The Bible? The works of all the classical philosophers?" Professor Wallhausen's companion, the magazine editor Max Burkel, asked. 'Yes, and with all the variations in wording nobody has thought up yet. You'll find the lost works of Tacitus and their translations into all living and dead languages. Furthermore, all of my and my friend Burkel's future works, all forgotten and still undelivered speeches in all parliaments, the official version of the Universal Declaration of Peace, the history of all the subsequent wars...'

" 'I'm going to subscribe right now,' Burkel exclaimed. 'This will furnish me with all the future volumes of my magazine; I won't have to read manuscripts any more!' Professor Wallhausen decided to calculate how many volumes (a large but finite number) the universal library would have to contain.  ' 'Will you — ' he turned to his daughter — 'hand me a sheet of paper and a pencil from my desk?' Max Burkel added, 'Bring the logarithm table too.' After a few minutes Wallhausen had the result, and wrote it down: 10^2,000,000.

" 'You make your life easy,' remarked Mrs. Wallhausen. 'Why don't you write it down in the normal manner?'

" 'Not me. This would take me at least two weeks, without time out for food and sleep. If you printed that figure, it would be a little over two miles long.'

' 'What is the name of that figure?' the daughter wanted to know.

"It has no name," Wallhausen replied.

"The number of books in the Universal Library lies somewhere between a googol (10^100) and a googolplex (10^googol), numbers which were named, by 8-year-old Milton Sirotta and his uncle Edward Kasner, in 1938. In Lasswitz's tale, Wallhausen went on to demonstrate that there would not be enough room in the visible universe to contain all possible printed books. Editor Max Burkel's hope for the 'elimination of the author from the literary business' was doomed" (Edge: The Third Culture, "The Universal Library" by George Dyson, 11.30.05, accessed 05-25-2009).

In 1909 English writer E. M. Forster published a short story entitled The Machine Stops.

Describing a world in which people live beneath the surface of the earth, with technology running virtually all aspects of their lives, the story anticipated instant messaging and videoconferencing with a machine called "the speaking apparatus." It also anticipated television with a machine called the "cinematophote."

The only book that the main character in the story uses is an enormous technical manual about "the Machine."

Reacting to H. G. Wells's optimism about science and technology, and fearing that man might be unable to live without the all-encompassing technology that he created, or eventually might not even remember that the technology was man-made, Forster stressed the value of actual or direct experience versus "virtual" experience.

On January 25, 1915 the AT&T long-distance telegraph network, the development of which began in 1885, finally reached from New York to San Francisco, allowing Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas Watson in San Francisco to participate in the first transcontinental telephone call.

"Four locations participated in the first call. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and co-founder of AT&T, led a group of dignitaries in New York. His one-time assistant Thomas Watson, led a group in San Francisco. AT&T President Theodore Vail [cousin of telegraphy inventor Alfred Vail] spoke from Jekyll Island, Ga. And U.S. President Woodrow Wilson spoke from the White House.  

At one point during the call, someone asked Professor Bell if he would repeat the first words he ever said over the telephone. He obliged, picking up the phone and repeating 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.' To which Watson, in San Francisco, replied, 'It would take me a week now.' "(http://www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/transcontinental.html, accessed 01-24-2010).

English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, published Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process at Cambridge at Cambridge University Press.  In this work Richardson described a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

On April 3, 1933 The New York Times published an article entitled and summarized in sub-headings, as follows: "Emotions Mapped by New Geography: Charts seem to Portray the Psychological Currents of Human Relationships. FIRST STUDIES EXHIBITED. Colored Lines Show Likes and Dislikes of Individuals and of Groups. MANY MISFITS REVEALED. Dr. J.L. Moreno Calculates There Are 10 to 15 Million Isolated Individuals In Nation." The article reported on an interview with Romanian-born Austrian-American psychiatrist, psychosociologist, and group psychotherapy pioneer Jacob L Moreno. This article contained the first reproduction of one of Moreno's sociograms—an early network visualization.

The following year Moreno published a book entitled Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations in Washington, D.C. Apart from its psychiatric and sociological significance, this work contained some of the earliest graphic depictions of social networks— data visualization methods later applied to numerous other disciplines. These images were later called sociograms. For a second edition published in New York in 1953 Moreno revised the title to Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama. 

Lima, Visual Complexity. Mapping Patterns of Information (2011) 75-76.

In 1936 H. G. Wells issued a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia, publishing a lecture he had delivered at The Royal Institution on November 20, 1936. The lecture was republished in the United States in the April 1937 issue of Harpers Magazine.  

In 1938 Methuen publishers issued a volume of Wells's essays and speeches on this theme entitled World Brain. In this book his 1936 speech was renamed simply "World Encyclopedia."  The 1938 book included an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia." This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay in the book entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" described Wells' vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49)

Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

In his ideas for a "mental clearing house" Wells was probably influenced by "Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House.

Pages 72-73 of World Brain reproduced an early information graphic entitled "Knowledge Correlated through a World Encyclopaedia."

♦Aspects of Wells's vision were eventually realized on the Internet through the Wikipedia in ways that Wells could not have imagined. 

Börner, Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (2010) 25ff.

In 1941 Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges published the short story La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel) in his collection of stories entitled El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) in Buenos-Aires through the publishing house of Editorial Sur. 

In 1944 the entire 1941 book was included in his Ficciones (1944), through which it received much larger circulation. In 1962 two different English-language translations of The Library of Babel appeared: one by James E. Irby in a collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the Ficciones. A new translation by Andrew Hurley appeared in 1998 as part of a translation of the Collected Fictions. Hurley's translation of The Library of Babel was republished separately in 2000 by David R. Godine with reproductions of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières illustrating Borges' text.

Borges' story of a universe in the form of a library, or an imaginary universal library, has been viewed as a fictional or philosophical predictor of characteristics and criticisms of the Internet.

"Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

"Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the 'Crimson Hexagon', containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God" (Wikipedia article on The Library of Babel, accessed 05-25-2009).

Vannevar Bush of MIT published an article entitled "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 176, No. 1 [1945] 641-49) describing the Memex, an electromechanical microfilm machine which evolved from his "Rapid Selector" project, capable of making permanent associative links in information. This hypothetical machine foreshadowed aspects of the personal computer and hyperlinks on the Internet. 

In 1950 Richard W. Hamming of Bell Labs and the City College of New York published Error Detecting and Error Codes.

On September 25, 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, became operational, carrying 36 telephone channels. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956. 

Prior to this development, since 1927, very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. However, radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried only around 2000 calls per year.

Fernando J. Corbató and team at MIT developed one of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System.)

CTSS had one of the first computerized text formatting utilities, called RUNOFF, the precursor of word processing, and one of the first inter-user messaging implementations, presaging instant messaging and electronic mail.

In 1961 British science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke of Sri Lanka published a short story entitled "Dial F for Frankenstein."

". . . it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems" (John Markoff, "The Coming Superbrain," New York Times, May 24, 2009).

"The father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credits Clarke's short story, Dial F for Frankenstein, as an inspiration" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-turns-to-fact-799519.html, accessed 05-24-2009).

Leonard Kleinrock submitted his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.

Kleinrock's thesis proposal was the first paper on what later came to be known as data communications, or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.)

"In 1962, Bell Labs developed the first digitally multiplexed transmission of voice signals. This innovation not only created a more economical, robust and flexible network design for voice traffic, but also laid the groundwork for today's advanced network services such as 911, 800-numbers, call-waiting and caller-ID. In addition, digital networking was the foundation for the convergence of computing and communications."

Leonard Kleinrock published "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This was the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. Kleinrock's MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, elaborated on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

J.C.R. Licklider of Bolt, Baranek, and Newman and Welden E. Clark published “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

On October 1, 1962 J.C. R. Licklider was appointed Director of The Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Licklider's  initial budget was $10,000,000 per year. Licklider eventually initiated the sequence of events leading to ARPANET.

As a result of Engelbart's 1962 report, J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), funded Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in early 1963. The first experiments done there included trying to connect a display at SRI to the massive and unique AN/FSQ-32 computer at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

From his office at The Pentagon J.C.R. Licklider, Director of Behavioral Sciences Command & Control Research at ARPA,  the U. S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly called the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent” (Waldrop).

Leonard Kleinrock published his 1962 PhD thesis in book form as Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, providing a technology and mathematical theory of data communications. (See Reading 13.4.)

Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, wrote On Distributed Communications, describing the use of redundant routing and message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, and based on two IBM mainframes in Briarcliff Manor, New York, became operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

The Homestead Meeting between J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory inspired Roberts to develop the concept of a computer-to-computer network that could communicate via data packets. This became the basis of the ARPANET.

Though its exact history is murky, email (e-mail) began as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate.

Among the first systems to have an email facility were System Development Corporation of Santa Monica's programming for the AN/FSQ-32  (Q32) built by IBM for the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC), and MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).  The authors of the first email program for CTSS were American software engineer Tom Van Vleck and American computer scientist Noel Morris. The two men created the program in the summer of 1965.

"A proposed CTSS MAIL command was described in an undated Programming Staff Note 39 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 39 proposed a facility that would allow any CTSS user to send a message to any other. The proposed uses were communication from "the system" to users informing them that files had been backed up, and communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.

"I was a new member of the MIT programming staff in spring 1965. When I read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, I asked "where is it?" and was told there was nobody available to write it. My colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. The CTSS manual writeup and the source code of MAIL are available online. (We made a few changes from the proposal during the course of implementation: e.g. to read one's mail, users just used the PRINT command instead of a special argument to MAIL.)  

"The idea of sending "letters' using CTSS was resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a faclility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need. (Users who had lost a file due to system or user error, or had it deleted for inactivity, had to submit a request form to Operations, who ran the RETRIEVE program to reload them from tape.) Since the blue 7094 installation in Building 26 had no CTSS terminal available for the operators, one proposal for sending such messages was to invoke MAIL from the 7094 console switches, inputting a code followed by the problem number and programmer number in BCD. I argued that this was much too complex and error prone, and that a facility that let any user send arbitrary messages to any other would have more general uses, which we would discover after it was implemented" (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html, accessed 06-20-2011).

♦ In June 2011 writer and filmmaker Errol Morris published a series of five illustrated articles in The New York Times concerning the roles of his brother Noel and Tom Van Vleck in the invention of email. The first of these appeared at this link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/?hp#ftn6.  The articles, in an usual dialog form, captured some of the experience of programming time-sharing mainframes and what it was like to send and receive emails at this early date.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson) published "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM '65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

Chinese-British-American electrical engineer and physicist Charles K. Kao of STC's Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, Essex, England, and George A. Hockham promoted the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers could be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication. Kao and Hockham proposed that the attenuation in fibers available at the time was caused by revovable impurities rather than by fundamental physical effects such as scattering. Eventually fiber optic communication became the technology enabling the Internet backbone.

In 2009 Charles Kao received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." A more detailed account of Kao's work, placing it in historical perspective, was prepared by the Nobel Prize Committee and may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

In October 1965 Lawrence G. Roberts did the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 in Lexington, Massachusetts to System Development Corporation's Q32 in Santa Monica, California.

This was the first time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets were used to communicate between computers.

Lawrence G. Roberts wrote Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers, describing networking research at MIT.

In December 1966 electrical engineer Lawrence G. Roberts became Chief Scientist at the ARPA IPTO (Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Technology Office), and began the design of the ARPANET. The ARPANET program as proposed to Congress by Roberts explored computer resource sharing and packet switching communications to ensure reliability.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England developed the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies.

This was an experiment in packet switching.

Ted Nelson (Theodor Holm Nelson), Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborated on the first hypertext editing system, based on Nelson's concept of hypertext.

They developed the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

At the ARPANET Design Session held by Lawrence G. Roberts at the ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wesley Clark suggested the use of mini-computers for network packet switches instead of using the main frame computers on the Arpanet for switching.

These machines were called Interface Message Processors.

The Department of Defense requested the Director of the Advanced Research Planning Agency (ARPA) to form a Task Force “to study and recommend hardware and software safeguards that would satisfactorily protect classified information in multi-access, resource-sharing computer systems.” Their report was published in 1970.

Welsh computer scientist Donald W. Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, introduced the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper called “A Digital Communications Network for Computers.”

In October 1967 Lawrence G. Roberts published the first paper on the design of the ARPANET: “Multiple computer networks and intercomputer communication,” at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles at Gatlinburg, Tennessee. (See Reading 13.5)

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT and Robert W. Taylor published The Computer as a Communication Device in which they described features of the future ARPANET. (See Reading 13.6.)

In 1969 Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.

Compuserve was founded in Columbus, Ohio, as a way to generate income from Golden United Life Insurance mainframe computers during non-business hours.

Comcast became the first commercial online service in the United States.

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodied peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

The first ARPANET node was installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center.

Leonard Kleinrock established the first network connection between a network packet switch called an Interface Message Processor, ancestor of today's routers, and a time-shared host computer. (See Reading 13.7.)

The first message was sent over the ARPANET from Leonard Kleinrock’s UCLA computer by student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969, to the second node at Stanford Research Institute’s computer in Menlo Park, California.

The message was simply “Lo.”

"The message text was the word login; the l and the o letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was lo. About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login" (Wikipedia article on Arpanet, accessed 12-26-2012).

By December 5, 1969 the ARPANET consisted of four nodes:

1. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center. 

2. The Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, where Douglas Engelbart had created the ground-breaking NLS system, a very important early hypertext system.

3. University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center. 

4. The University of Utah's Computer Science Department, where Ivan Sutherland had moved.

In 1970 Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC became the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet.

In 1970 American engineer and computer scientist Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii built ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet-switched data network, using packet radio.

Unlike the ARPANET where each node could talk to a node on the other end, ALOHA used a shared medium for transmission and revealed the need for contention management schemes. ALOHA’s situation was similar to issues that were later faced by Ethernet (non-switched) and Wi-Fi networks.

Robert D. Maurer and his team, working for Corning Glass, Corning, New York, obtained the crucial attenuation level of 20 dB required for optical fiber telecommunications.

The group demonstrated a fiber with 17 dB optic attenuation per kilometer by doping silica glass with titanium. A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB/km using germanium dioxide as the core dopant. Such low attenuations improved optical fiber telecommunications and enabled the Internet.

In March 1970 ARPANET established a fifth node at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, thereby spanning the U.S.

In 1971 the ARPANET had 15 nodes (23 hosts).  They were: 

UCLA

Stanford Research Institute

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of Utah

Bolt, Beranek and Newman (Cambridge, Mass)

MIT

The Rand Corporation (Santa Monica)

Software Development Corporation (Santa Monica)

Harvard

Lincoln Laboratory (Lexington, MA)

Stanford

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Case Western Reserve University

Carnegie Mellon University

NASA/Ames Research Laboratory.

Ray Tomlinson at Bolt, Beranek and Newman developed email (e-mail) for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.

According to an infographic on the history of email posted at http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/email.png in June 2011 Tomlinson no longer remembered the content of the original message.

Lawrence G. Roberts of ARPA in Arlington, Virginia, wrote the first email management program, RD, to list incoming messages and support forwarding, filing, and responding to them.

Probably the world's first online community began to emerge through online forums, and the message board called PLATO Notes developed by David Woolley, in the PLATO IV system evolving at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein established the first public computerized bulletin board system (BBS) called Community Memory in Berkeley, California. Community Memory used hard-wired terminals in neighborhoods as distinct from the first public dial-up CBBS which was set up on February 16, 1978.

"Community Memory ran off an XDS-940 timesharing computer located in Resource One in San Francisco. The first terminal was an ASR-33 Teletype at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley. You could leave messages and attach keywords to them. Other people could then find messages by those keywords.

"The line from San Francisco to Berkeley ran at 110 baud - 10 characters per second. The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" playing in the record store. Musicians loved it - they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars. And out of it also emerged the first net personality - Benway, as he called himself."

The first ARPANET international connections were established to University College, London and the independent geo-scientific research foundation, NORSAR in Kjeller, Norway.

Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn invented the word Internet about this time as an abbreviation for the "inter-networking of networks" (Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet [1998] 111).

In March 1973 Stanford Research Institute Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) began publishing ARPANET News. At this time the number of ARPANET users was estimated at 2000.

IBM announced Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a networking protocol for computing systems. SNA was a uniform set of rules and procedures for computer communications to free computer users from the technical complexities of communicating through local, national, and international computer networks.

Working at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, Charles F. Goldfarb developed the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

SGML became an ISO accepted standard on October 15, 1986.  

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in which they described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). (See Reading 13.8.)

Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC invented Ethernet.

Initially the speed of Ethernet was three megabits per second. Ethernet evolved "into the most widely implemented physical and link layer protocol."

The first two-network demonstration of the Internet Protocol Suite, TCP/IP was performed between Stanford and University College London (UCL).

In November 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, UK, and Norway.

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene—a "community" specializing in the distribution of pirated content—started emerging around this time. It was used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups who made their work public on privately run BBS systems.

"The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications" (Wikipedia article on the Warez scene, accessed 07-20-2009).

Robert Metcalf and David Boggs published the first detailed description of ethernet: Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks.

Gary Thuerk, a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sales representative, attempted to send the first intentional commercial spam to every ARPANET address on the West Coast of the U.S.  Thuerek thought that Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated ARPANET protocol support directly into the new DECSYSTEM-20 and TOPS-20 OS.

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a sociologist at Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey, and her husband, Murray Turoff, a professor of computer science, showed how "computer-mediated communication" could develop social networking in their book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer.

Rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany, and throughout France in 1982 by PTT (Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications), the Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines.  In 1991 PTT was divided into France Télécom and La Poste, with the Minitel operated by France Télécom. Users of the Minitel could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a way similar to the Internet.

"Millions of terminals were lent for free to telephone subscribers, resulting in a high penetration rate among businesses and the public. In exchange for the terminal, the possessors of Minitel would not be given free 'white page' printed directories (alphabetical list of residents and firms), but only the yellow pages (classified commercial listings, with advertisements); the white pages were accessible for free on Minitel, and they could be searched by a reasonably intelligent search engine; much faster than flipping through a paper directory.

"France Télécom estimates that almost 9 million terminals—including web-enabled personal computers (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)—had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (of a total population of 60 million). Developed by 10,000 companies, in 1996, almost 26,000 different services were available" (Wikipedia article in Minitel, accessed 07-11-2012).

Though usage was concentrated in France, the Minitel had a significant level of usage primarily in other European countries. The service was introduced in the United States very late, in 1993, by which time it faced serious competition from early Internet providers such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe.  The Minitel service was finally shut down by France Télécom on June 30, 2012.

Compuserve, Columbus, Ohio, became the first online service to offer personal computer users email communication and online technical support. The following year it offered real-time chat online with its CB simulator.

Robert Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet, founded 3Com. Metcalf convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox

"to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard, the so-called 'DIX' standard, for 'Digital/Intel/Xerox'; it standardized the 10 megabits/second Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit type field. The standard was first published on September 30, 1980. It competed with two largely proprietary systems, token ring and ARCNET, but those soon found themselves buried under a tidal wave of Ethernet products."

In 1980 Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis established USENET, one of the first computer network communications systems. Truscott and Ellis conceived USENET as a "poor man's ARPANET."

The first newsgroups seem to have been established virtually at the inception of USENET.

"The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.

" At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton. But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet" (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x10, accessed 01-16-2010).

In 1981 there were 213 hosts on ARPANET; a new host was added approximately every 20 days.

The U.S. National Science Foundation funded CSNET (the "Computer Science Network") with leadership by Larry Landweber and David J. Farber. 

CSNET was a computer network linking academic Computer Science departments nationwide—an alternative to ARPANET, to which many Computer Science departments did not have the privilege of access. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange.

DCA (Defense Communications Agency) and ARPA established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and IP (Internet Protocol), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This led to one of the first definitions of an “internet” as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and the “Internet” as connected TCP/IP internets.

ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET. MILNET, designed for unclassified U.S. Department of Defense traffic, was integrated into the Defense Data Network that was created the previous year.

Control Video Corporation founded by William van Miester, of the Washington D.C. area, offered video games "by telephone" for Atari VCS game machine owners through a service called GameLine. Using variable speed adaptive modem technology, GameLine planned other services for the millions of game machine owners who might upgrade their units with programmable adaptors. The company nearly went bankrupt. After revamping its product line, the company changed its name to Quantum Computer Services in 1985.

In 1991 the company was renamed America Online (AOL).

ARPANET required that all connected machines use TCP/IP. TCP/ IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP (Network Control Program) entirely.

Paul V. Mockapetris of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California, designed and introduced the Domain Name System (DNS), for ARPANET.  The six original domains were .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int.

At Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Frederick Cohen demonstrated a virus-like program on a VAX11/750 system. The program was able to install itself to, or infect, other system objects.

In 1984 Cohen used the phrase "computer virus" – as suggested by his teacher Leonard Adleman – to describe the operation of such programs in terms of "infection". He defined a 'virus' as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.”

Moderated newsgroups are introduced on USENET.

In 1984 the number of hosts connected to the Internet exceeded 1000.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), was officially broken up, ending a long-established monopoly on telephone service. AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, known as "Baby Bells." AT&T, reduced in value by about 70%, continued to run all its long distance services.

Computer scientists Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner from Stanford University founded Cisco Systems. They named the company for San Francisco, gateway to the Pacific Rim. Beginning to experiment with connecting detached networks, Bosack and Lerner ran network cables between two different buildings on the Stanford campus, connecting them first with bridges, and then with routers.

Symbolics.com, owned by Symbolics, Inc., a computer manufacturer founded by Russel Noftsker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first registered domain on the Internet.

Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, one of the first online communities, in Sausalito, California. It later became  known as The WELL, and connected to the Internet in 1992.

Quantum Computer Services, Vienna, Virginia, launched an online bulletin-board service, Quantum Link (Q-Link), for users of Commodore-64 and 128 personal computers. The company renamed itself America Online (AOL) in 1991.

In 1986 the number of hosts on the ARPANET/Internet exceeded five thousand.

The National Science Foundation approved funding for the Internet backbone.

The National Science Foundation Network connected five new supercomputer centers and allowed access to these centers at no cost. The centers, which the NSF funded in 1985, were: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

NSFNET used a TCP/IP-based protocol compatible with ARPANET, as a backbone to which regional and academic networks would connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic.  As a result of a November 1987 NSF award to a consortium of universities in Michigan, the original 56- kbit/s links was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s by July 1988 and again to 45 Mbit/s in 1991.

"The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the Internet, and its broad commercialization in the mid-1990s. Basically, the NSFNET opened up the Internet to the world. Some critical Internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in Internet history. BGP was specifically created to allow the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes learned via multiple paths from originally the Arpanet, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the Internet into a meshed infrastructure, backing away from the single-core architecture which the Arpanet had been using before."

The IRS began electronic tax filing (e-filing) to lower operating costs and paper usage, using the processing system developed in 1969 by the IRS,

The Brain boot sector virus (aka Pakistani flu) was released. Brain is considered the first IBM PC compatible virus, and the program responsible for the first IBM PC compatible virus epidemic. Also known as Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, the virus was created in Lahore, Pakistan by 19 year old Pakistani programmer, Basit Farooq Alvi, and his brother, Amjad Farooq Alvi.

The Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1986 SGML) was accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva, Switzerland.

SGML was:

"an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 defines generalized markup:

"Generalized markup is based on two novel postulates:

"Markup should describe a document's structure and other attributes, rather than specify the processing to be performed on it, as descriptive markup need be done only once, and will suffice for future processing. Markup should be rigorous so that the techniques available for processing rigorously-defined objects like programs and data bases, can be used for processing documents as well.

"SGML descended from IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) that Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie developed in the 1960s. Goldfarb, editor of the international standard, coined the 'GML' term using their surname initials. As a document markup language, SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable large-project documents in government, law, and industry. Many of these documents must remain readable for several decades — a long time in the information technology field. SGML also was extensively applied by the military, and the aerospace, technical reference, and industrial publishing businesses. The advent of the XML profile has made SGML suitable for widespread application for small-scale, general-purpose use" (Wikipedia article on Standard Generalized Markup Language. accessed 12-29-2009).

In 1987 the number of hosts on the Internet exceeded ten thousand.

American computer scientist Richard L. Adams, Jr. founded UUNET Communications Services, the first commercial internet service provider. On May 12 UUNET passed its first traffic via the CompuServe Network using UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Protocol).

"Although the ISP initially offered services only to research institutes and universities, it wasn't long before Adams began expanding operations. The launch of AlterNet in 1990 marked UUnet's first foray into commercial service, as well as its conversion to a for-profit company. The firm's new focus on the corporate sector paid off a few years later when it landed the contract to carry Internet traffic for the Microsoft Network, beating out competitors like AT&T Corp. and MCI Communications Corp. Adams took UUnet public in 1995, in one of the largest technology public offerings to date, and a year later agreed to a $2 billion buyout offer from MFS Communications, which was acquired by WorldCom shortly thereafter" (http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/2/Adams-Richard-L.html, accessed 02-28-2009).

C. Gordon Bell, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Computer Networking, Infrastructure and Digital Communications of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology, published A Report to the Office of Technology Policy on Computer Networks to Support Research in the United States. A Study of Critical Problems and Future Options. The report states:

“Over the next 15 years, there will be a need for a 100,000 times increase in national network capacity to enable researchers to exploit computer capabilities for representing complex data in visual form, for manipulating and interacting with this complex data and for sharing large data bases with other researchers.”

“As the first step, the current Internet system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the networks supported by agencies for researchers should be interconnected. These facilities, if coordinated and centrally managed, have the capability to interconnect many computer networks into a single virtual computer network. As the second step, the existing computer networks that support research programs should be expanded and upgraded to serve 200-400 research institutions with 1.5 million bits per second capabilities.

“As the third step, network service should be provided to every research institution in the U.S., with transmission speeds of three billion bits per second.” (p. 3)

Bell summarized the report in an article called Toward A National Research Telecommunications Network.

Lotus Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduced Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates. Lotus Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Z39.50 became the international standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval. Z39.50 made it possible for a user to search and retrieve information from other computer systems without knowing the search syntax used by those other systems.

Joseph D. Becker of Xerox Corporation, Rochester, New York, Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple developed a universal character set. Becker coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project in his report, Unicode 88:

"1.1. Abstract

"This document is a draft proposal for the design of an international/multilingual text character coding system, tentatively called Unicode.

"Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as 'wide-body ASCII' that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.

"In the Unicode system, a simple unambiguous fixed-length character encoding is integrated into a coherent overall architecture of text processing. The design aims to be flexible enough to support many disparate (vendor-specific) implementations of text processing software.

"A general scheme for character code allocations is proposed (and materials for making specific individual character code assignments are well at hand), but specific code assignments are not proposed here. Rather, it is hoped that this document will evoke interest from many organizations, which could cooperate in perfecting the design and in determining the final character code assignments" (http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf, accessed 01-29-2010).

The first computer worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm or Internet worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, quickly infected a great number of computers on the Internet.

"It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD Unix and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received three years probation, community service and a fine in excess of $10,000."

In 1989 the number of hosts on the Internet exceeded 100,000.

The first gateways between private e-mail carriers and the Internet were established. CompuServe was connected through Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, MCI in Auburn, Virginia, through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories recognized that a viewer or listener did not need to download the entirety of a program to view or listen to a portion of it, as long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest the data. At the InterTainment '89 conference held in New York City Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. It became the basis for "webcasting."

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, wrote Information Management: A Proposal, proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. 

In his words, this was a "an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was 'Mesh' "

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, students at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, wrote ARCHIE, a program designed to index FTP archives.  ARCHIE was the first “search engine,” as distinct from a “web search engine.”

Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, California, to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) was founded in Washington, D.C.  By the end of its first year its membership consisted of 18 institutions.

In 1990 the ARPANET discontinued operations and merged into the Internet

After a one-off event in 1984, annual TED conferences begain in 1990 in Montery, California.  In 2012 the events were held in Long Beach and Palm Springs in the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming video of the talks on the Internet. The TED organization is based in New York City and Vancouver.

TED speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their material in the most exciting and engaging way that they can, often through storytelling.

"Since June 2006 the talks have been offered for free viewing online, under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license, through TED.com. As of November 2011, over 1,050 talks are available free online. By January 2009 they had been viewed 50 million times. In June 2011, the viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and on Tuesday November 13, 2012, TED Talks had been watched one billion times worldwide, reflecting a still growing global audience."

"TED was conceived by architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, who observed a convergence of the fields of technology, entertainment and design. The first conference, organized by Wurman and Harry Marks in 1984, featured demos of the Sony compact disc, and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer.Presentations were given by famous mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and influential members of the digerati community, like Nicholas Negroponte en Steward Brand. The event was financially unsuccessful, however, and it took 6 years before the second conference was organized. From 1990 onward, a growing community of "TEDsters" has been gathering annually at the invitation-only event in Monterey, California, until 2009, when it was relocated to Long Beach, California due to a substantial increase of attendees" (Wikipedia article on Ted (conference), accessed 12-26-2012).

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland,  issued World Wide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project.

At CERN Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web page on a NeXT workstation.

During the Christmas holiday Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:

1, The first web browser called WorldWideWeb.

2. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

3. The first Web server, CERN httpd. It was operational on Christmas Day 1990.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), Arlington, Virginia, lifted restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET Backbone Network, clearing the way for electronic commerce.

The first webcam, called the CoffeeCam, pointed at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University.

"The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. Employing the X Window System protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web." (quoted from the Trojan Room Coffee Machine article in Wikipedia, accessed 11-23-2008).

The camera was finally switched off on August 22, 2001. The final image captured by the camera could be viewed at its homepage in November 2008.

American computer engineers Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, both of Thinking Machines, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Apple Computer, Dow Jones, and KPMG Peat Marwick, developed the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system. WAIS was a client-server text searching system that used the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications to search index databases on remote computers.

"Public WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular Veronica system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the World Wide Web's client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While gopher space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.

"The W3 data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The W3 hypertext model gives the program more power to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure" (Wikipedia article on Wide Area Information Server, accessed 01-06-2012).

Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, to a number of people at CERN. This release introduced the web to the high energy physics community, and began the spread of the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, posted on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, gave a short summary of the World Wide Web project, explained where to download a web server and line mode browser, and made it available all over the world at no cost.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system."

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Mark P. McCahill and team at the University of Minnesota developed the Gopher protocol, "a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet," but without hyperlinks.  This was a significant disadvantage to the World Wide Web.

They announced the Internet Gopher on USENET. Its central goals were:

"* A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users

"* A simple syntax

"* A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively

"* Extending the file system metaphor to include things like searches

" The source of the name "Gopher" is claimed to be threefold:

"1. Users instruct it to 'go for' information

"2. It does so through a web of menu items analogous to gopher holes

"3. The sports teams of the University of Minnesota are the Golden Gophers (Wikipedia article on Gopher (protocol), accessed 06-04-2009).

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law was decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

Through the efforts of  physicist and software developer Paul Kunz and Terry Hung, the first web server in North America went live at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

The first image posted to the web was a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes.

The Internet Society (ISOC) was chartered in 1992.  Its headquarters are in Reston, Virginia. In 2012 the society had 80 national chapters and 50,000 individual members.

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  founded an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

In 1992 there were 50 Web Servers on the Internet.

American writer Neal Stephenson published the science fiction novel, Snow Crash. In it he coined the term Metaverse to describe "how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the future."

In 1993 traffic on the Internet expanded at a 341,634 percent growth rate.

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photographed and developed a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. This was the first library of digital images on the Internet.

Villanova Law Review Symposium: The Congress, The Courts, and Computer-Based Communications Networks: Answering Questions About Access and Content Control was "perhaps the first law review symposium dedicated to cyberspace."

At this time it was estimated that in China, a country with about 1,000,000,000 people, only about 2000 people used the Internet.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded  at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN.

David Allen and Harold Williams founded Teleport, the first commercially successful telepresence company. Its name was later changed to TeleSuite.

"The original intent was to develop a system that could allow families to interact across great distances without the hassle or costliness of flying. The first systems (which they called TeleSuites) looked more like something out of an upper class home rather than a conference room in an office suite. . . . " 

"In 1993 total Internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year" (http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.html, accessed 06-04-2009).

In 1993 there were 250 web servers on the Internet.

Marc Andreesen of the Software Development Group,  National Center for Supercomputing Applications,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced on Usenet the creation of the NCSA Mosaic browser 0.10, and the introduction of the image tag.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), "the UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research," was established "at the University of Bristol under terms of letters of guidance from the Secretaries of State to the newly-established Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland, and Wales, inviting them to establish a Joint Committee to deal with networking and specialist information services."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign introduced Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

Tim O’Reilly, Sebastapol, California, launched the Global Network Navigator. This was the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it also contained the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator was sold to America Online in 1995.

Matthew Gray at MIT developed the web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer, to measure the size of the web.

Later in the year the World Wide Web Wanderer was used to generate an index called the "Wandex", providing what was probably the first web search engine.

Alan Saperstein of Visual Data Corporation, later Onstream Media, introduced streaming video with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. This was the beginning of video webcasting over the Internet.

"Everywhere on the global Internet, which is now roamed by an estimated 15 million computer users, the growth rates are staggering.

"At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill., a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October. Officials at the center say the only solution may be to take a $15 million supercomputer away from its normal scientific number-crunching duties and employ it full time as an electronic librarian.

"This year, information retrieved using a popular searching program called Gopher increased more than 400 percent, to almost 200 billion bytes a month -- about seven million newspaper pages" (John Markoff, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, accessed 06-04-2009).

Martijn Koster developed ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer, this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It was demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994.

"Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

In 1994 the number of websites reached 10,000. There were 2500 web servers on the Internet.

In 1994 an early web search engine, the World Wide Web Worm, developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado at Boulder, had an index of 110,000 pages and web-accessible documents. It received an average of 1500 queries per day.

The NSFNET backbone was upgraded to 155 Mbps as traffic passed 10 trillion bytes per month.

HTTP (Web) packets surpassed FTP traffic as the largest-volume Internet protocol.

NSFNET reverted back to a research network, and the main U. S. backbone traffic went through interconnected network providers.

In 1994 the first demonstration of wireless Internet access occured at Bell Labs.

On the Internet Kevin Hughes published a pioneering cultural and historical work entitled From Webspace to Cyberspace.

Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, started his web-based diary, Justin's Links from the Underground, Links.net, offering one of the earliest guided tours of the web. This is considered one of the earliest blogs.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, published in Wired magazine an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

This, or a very similar text, was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

Commissioned to develop an Internet event for "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future," an arts weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Ivan Pope wrote a proposal outlining the concept of a café with Internet access from the tables. Pope's Cybercafe, the first Internet cafe, operated during the weekend event.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  changed the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion was "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

Filo and Yang selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They created the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Marc Andreesen, one of the programmers of Mosaic, and James H. Clark of Silicon Graphics founded Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California. Mosaic Communications was the first company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser, and the first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.

Commercial spamming started when a pair of immigation lawyers from Phoenix, Arizona, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, used bulk Usenet postings to advertise immigration law services. This was called the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings: "Green Card Lottery-Final One?"

"Canter and Siegel sent their advertisement, with the subject 'Green Card Lottery - Final One?', to at least 5,500 Usenet discussion groups, a huge number at the time. Rather than cross-posting a single copy of the message to multiple groups, so a reader would only see it once (considered a common courtesy when posting the same message to more than one group), they posted it as separate postings in each newsgroup, so a reader would see it in each group they read. Their internet service provider, Internet Direct, received so many complaints that its mail servers crashed repeatedly for the next two days; it promptly terminated their service. Despite the ire directed at the two lawyers, they posted another advertisement to 1,000 newsgroups in June 1994. This time, Arnt Gulbrandsen put together the first software "cancelbot" to trawl Usenet and kill their messages within minutes. The couple claimed in a December 1994 interview to have gained 1,000 new clients and 'made $100,000 off an ad that cost them only pennies' " (Wikipedia article on Lawrence Cantor and Martha Siegel, accessed 03-17-2012).

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, became operational.

"Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public."

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcast over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

The First International Conference on the World Wide Web took place at CERN in Geneva.

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invented the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

Marc Andreesen of Mosaic Communications Corporation released Mosaic Netscape 0.9, beta on USENET: 

"Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

"You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

"ftp.mcom.com in /netscape

"gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm

"lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape

"ftp.meer.net in /Netscape doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape

"archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape

"ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only) mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

"Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.  

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to rele...@mcom.com.  

"Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.  

"A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i...@mcom.com for more information.

"Have fun!

"Marc and the gang

i...@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/"

One month later, in November 1994 the company renamed itself Netscape Communications Corporation.

A Rolling Stones concert with 50, 000 fans at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, became the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opened the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio, accessed 03-18-2012).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) became the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC used an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994.

WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) started streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this was WREK's beta launch and the stream was not advertised until a later date.

A broadcast by Seattle based space rock group Sky Cries Mary was the first live Internet only broadcast of a live band on November 10th, 1994.  The broadcast was done by Paul Allen's Seattle based digital media start-up Starwave.

WebtraffIQ.com developed the first commercial web page tagging system.

During 1995 up to 700 new web servers were registered each day, and there were approximately 73,500 servers.

During this year WWW was generally equated with the Internet.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founded craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It evolved into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist eventually made a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City. By providing most classified advertising for free it undermined the traditional income stream of printed newspapers.

Ward Cunningham, Portland, Oregon, established the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ You can watch a video of an interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum in 2006 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6nNqSASGo

Robert McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, and a group of collaborative software developers initially known as the Apache Group, made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server software in April 1995. McCool wrote the first version of NCSA HTTPd as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while working on the original NCSA Mosaic team.

"Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server software in use. As of September 2009 Apache served over 54.48% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest."

"There have been two explanations of the project's name. According to the Apache Foundation, the name was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare. However, the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website, from 1996 to 2001, claimed that The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server. The first explanation was supported at an Apache Conference and in an interview in 2000 by Brian Behlendorf, who said that the name connoted 'Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass'. Behlendorf then contradicted this in a 2007 interview, stating that 'The Apache server isn't named in honor of Geronimo's tribe' but that so many revisions were sent in that 'the group called it 'a patchy Web server' '. Both explanations are probably appropriate" (Wikipedia article on Apache HTTP server, accessed 02-02-2010).

Netscape Communications, Mountain View, California, had a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now became the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This was the beginning of Internet Protocol Television IPTV.

In 1996 computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive in San Francisco.  After the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in 2002 the Internet Archive established a mirror site at that historic location.

1996 was the first year in which more email was sent than paper mail in the United States.

In 1996 there were 14,352,000 Internet hosts and 100,000 websites.

In response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

"The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet" (Wikipedia article on Mobile web, accessed 04-25-2009).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, began collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

The first recorded use of the term "phishing" (baits used to "catch financial information and passwords) occured on the "alt.online-service. America-online" Usenet newsgroup after AOL introduced measures to prevent using fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to open accounts. To obtain legitimate credit card information AOL crackers resorted to phishing.

In 1997 the Internet2 consortium was established, with offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Washington, D.C.

Michael Lesk attempted to calculate "How Much Information is There in the World?" He included information on how much information a human brain may be able to retain.

Nettracker.com produced the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) implemented Carnivore, a customizable packet sniffer, or packet analyzer, that could monitor all of a user's network traffic.

"The Carnivore system was a Microsoft Windows-based workstation with packet-sniffing software and a removable disk drive. This computer must be physically installed at an Internet service provider (ISP) or other location where it can "sniff" traffic on a LAN segment to look for email messages in transit. The technology itself was not highly advanced — it used a standard packet sniffer and straightforward filtering. The critical components of the operation were the filtering criteria. To accurately match the appropriate subject, an elaborate content model was developed" (Wikipedia article on Carnivore, accessed 01-14-2012).

"On July 11, 2000, the existence of an FBI Internet monitoring system called "Carnivore" was widely reported. Although the public details were sketchy, reports indicated that the Carnivore system is installed at the facilities of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and can monitor all traffic moving through that ISP. The FBI claims that Carnivore "filters" data traffic and delivers to investigators only those "packets" that they are lawfully authorized to obtain. Because the details remain secret, the public is left to trust the FBI's characterization of the system and -- more significantly -- the FBI's compliance with legal requirements.

"One day after the initial disclosures, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the public release of all FBI records concerning Carnivore, including the source code, other technical details, and legal analyses addressing the potential privacy implications of the technology. On July 18, 2000, after Carnivore had become a major issue of public concern, EPIC asked the Justice Department to expedite the processing of its request. When DOJ failed to respond within the statutory deadline, EPIC filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking the immediate release of all information concerning Carnivore.

"At an emergency hearing held on August 2, 2000, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the FBI to report back to the court by August 16 and to identify the amount of material at issue and the Bureau's schedule for releasing it. The FBI subsequently reported that 3000 pages of responsive material were located, but it refused to commit to a date for the completion of processing.  

"In late January 2001, the FBI completed its processing of EPIC's FOIA request. The Bureau revised its earlier estimate and reported that there were 1756 pages of responsive material; 1502 were released in part and 254 were withheld in their entirety (see link below for sample scanned documents).  

"On August 1, 2001, the FBI moved for summary judgment, asserting that it fully met its obligations under FOIA. On August 9, 2001, EPIC filed a motion to stay further proceedings pending discovery, on the grounds that the FBI has failed to conduct an adequate search for responsive documents.  

"On March 25, 2002, the court issued an order directing the FBI to initiate a new search for responsive documents. The new search was to be conducted in the offices of General Counsel and Congressional & Public Affairs, and be completed no later than May 24, 2002. The documents listed above were located and released as a result of that court-ordered search" (http://epic.org/privacy/carnivore/, accessed 01-14-2012).

IN 1997 there were one million websites on the Internet.

In June 1997 Wireless Application Protocol or WAP was established as a secure specification that allowed users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union all 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court voted to strike down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violated the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices concurred in part and dissented in part to the decision. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Court rules that "223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.

"The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the 'knowing' transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything 'that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs' " (Wikipedia article on Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union).

A human error at Network Solutions, Herndon, Virginia, caused the Domain Name System (DNS) table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. In the four hours it took to repair the error the problem spread throughout the Internet.

W3C released the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels.

Voice over Internet equipment, using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), became available.

In 1998 Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger published the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses, presumably, and possibly grandiosely, in the tradition of Martin Luther.

The manifesto was first published online, followed in December 1999 by a printed book issued by Perseus Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.”

In 1998 Bell Labs reported the first long-distance transmission of one terabit (trillion bits) of data per second over a single strand of optical fiber.

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) began the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV serving Dallas-Ft. Worth in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP serving Wichita, Kansas, on January 10, 1998.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN's tasks include responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. . .  ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes" (Wikipedia article in ICANN, accessed 05-16-2010).

In anticipation of the exhaustion of available IP addresses under IPv4, The Network Working Group of The Internet Society drafted the IPv6 standard.

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled that Internet domain names are property.

The short range wireless networking standard, Bluetooth, was announced.

NTT DoCoMo introduced the mobile web to Japan with the first full internet service on mobile phones, and the first mobile-specific web browser. 

In 1999 British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton, co-founder of the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, invented the term "The Internet of Things" to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors, including RFID (Radio-frequency identification).

"Ashton's original definition was: 'Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet ... leave out the most numerous and important routers of all - people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that's a big deal. We're physical, and so is our environment ... You can't eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today's information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.' "(Wikipedia article on Internet of Things, accessed 01-07-2013).

American computer programmer and entrepreneur Shawn Fanning released the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts. After Napster's early explosive success Fanning moved the company to San Mateo, California. "The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it merged with Rhapsody on 1 December 2011" (Wikipedia article on Napster, accessed 03-18-2012).

"It [Napster] was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

In August 1999 Magid M. Abraham and Gian M. Fulgoni founded comScore with the objective of creating the first service to measure trends in e-commerce.

"At the time, no market research company measured online buying behavior. The two leading online measurement companies, Media Metrix and Nielsen NetRatings, were focused solely on tracking Internet users’ site visitation behavior, providing their clients with basic metrics on the size and demographic characteristics of site audiences.

"The panels these two companies used numbered in the tens of thousands. This was far too small a sample size to accurately measure e-commerce since, on average, only 5 percent of a site’s visitors converted into buyers in any month. A panel of at least a million people would be needed. That was a daunting challenge because no research company had ever built a panel of 100,000 people, let alone a million. However, since their experience at IRI had shown that marketers spend four times as many research dollars measuring consumers’ buying behavior as they spend measuring media ratings, Magid and Gian were confident that an attractive market existed for online browsing and buying information. They decided to take on the challenge by raising and willingly investing tens of millions of dollars to discover ways in which to successfully recruit millions of opt-in panelists and develop the technology needed to capture, warehouse and analyze massive quantities of online data" (http://www.comscore.com/About_comScore/comScore_History, accessed 05-12-2009).

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (also known as Truth in Domain Names Act), was enacted into U.S. law as is part of A bill to amend the provisions of title 17, United States Code, and the Communications Act of 1934, relating to copyright licensing and carriage of broadcast signals by satellite (S. 1948). The act mades people who registered domain names that are either trademarks or individual's names with the sole intent of selling the rights of the domain name to the trademark holder or individual for a profit liable to civil action.

"In order for a trademark owner to bring a claim under the ACPA, the owner must establish

• the trademark owner’s mark is distinctive or famous;
• the domain name owner acted in bad faith to profit from the mark; and
• the domain name and the trademark are either identical or confusingly similar (or dilutive for famous trademarks)" 

(Wikipedia article on Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, accessed 11-24-2008).

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was enacted in part because the domain whitehouse.com went online in 1997 as an "adult entertainment" site, leading to this letter from a Whitehouse consel:

"The following is a December letter from a White House counsel to the operator of the "whitehouse.com" adult site regarding the use of the domain and the names and images of the White House, President Clinton, and Hillary Clinton on the site:

"The White House

"Washington

"December 8, 1997

"Mr. Dan Parisi

"Secaucus, New Jersey

"Dear Mr. Parisi:

"It will come as no surprise to you that the White House Counsel's Office is aware of your Internet Web site, "www.whitehouse.com," and that we object to your use of the names and images of the White House, the President, and the First Lady on that Web site to sell memberships in an adult video club. We also recognize that you undoubtedly will use this letter as an object of humor and as an invitation to advance the claim that you are merely exercising your rights under the First Amendment.

"We too believe in the First Amendment--and in humor, although we see nothing humorous in your use of the White House domain name to draw children and other unwitting Internet users to your Web site. However distasteful your business may be, we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences. As your own online disclaimer implicitly acknowledges, the foreseeable result of your use of the White House domain name is that children will access your Web site inadvertently. Your customers will understand that such a result is unconscionable, and so, we submit, should you.

Sincerely,

Charles F.C. Ruff

Counsel to the President" (http://news.cnet.com/2009-1023-207800.html, accessed 06-15-2009).

At some point in 2000 there were 72,398,092 Internet hosts and 9,950,491 websites.

Web size estimates by Inktomi at this time surpassed 1 billion pages that could be indexed.

John D. Leckenby of The University of Texas at Austin and Hairong Li of Michigan State University founded the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD).

The inaugural issue of the journal

"defined Interactive Advertising as the 'paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.' This is most commonly performed through the Internet as a medium" (Wikipedia article on Interactive advertising, accessed 04-22-2009).

By February 2000 over 10,000,000 domain names were registered.

The dot-com bubble, thought to have begun with the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995, reached its climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52.

After this date the dot-com bubble began to burst.

In September 2000 here were 20,000,000 websites on the Internet; the number had doubled since February of 2000.

The 19th Session of the National People's Congress of China adopted the Decision of the Standing Committee of NPC Regarding the Safeguarding of Internet Security.

American computer programmer Bram Cohen of San Francisco released the first implementation of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

Michael K. Bergman, founder of BrightPlanet, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, published "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value," Journal of Electronic Publishing VII (2001) no. 1.  In  publishing this paper Bergman has been credited with coining the expression, "the deep web."

"Searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean. While a great deal may be caught in the net, there is still a wealth of information that is deep, and therefore, missed. The reason is simple: Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines never find it. 

"Traditional search engines create their indices by spidering or crawling surface Web pages. To be discovered, the page must be static and linked to other pages. Traditional search engines can not "see" or retrieve content in the deep Web — those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search. Because traditional search engine crawlers can not probe beneath the surface, the deep Web has heretofore been hidden.  

"The deep Web is qualitatively different from the surface Web. Deep Web sources store their content in searchable databases that only produce results dynamically in response to a direct request. But a direct query is a "one at a time" laborious way to search. BrightPlanet's search technology automates the process of making dozens of direct queries simultaneously using multiple-thread technology and thus is the only search technology, so far, that is capable of identifying, retrieving, qualifying, classifying, and organizing both "deep" and "surface" content.  

If the most coveted commodity of the Information Age is indeed information, then the value of deep Web content is immeasurable. With this in mind, BrightPlanet has quantified the size and relevancy of the deep Web in a study based on data collected between March 13 and 30, 2000.

Our key findings include:

♦ Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.

♦ The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web.

♦ The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web.

♦ More than 200,000 deep Web sites presently exist.

♦ Sixty of the largest deep-Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information — sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the surface Web forty times.

♦ On average, deep Web sites receive fifty per cent greater monthly traffic than surface sites and are more highly linked to than surface sites; however, the typical (median) deep Web site is not well known to the Internet-searching public.

♦ The deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet.

 ♦ Deep Web sites tend to be narrower, with deeper content, than conventional surface sites.

♦ Total quality content of the deep Web is 1,000 to 2,000 times greater than that of the surface Web.

 ♦ Deep Web content is highly relevant to every information need, market, and domain.

 ♦ More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic-specific databases.

♦ A full ninety-five per cent of the deep Web is publicly accessible information — not subject to fees or subscriptions.

"To put these findings in perspective, a study at the NEC Research Institute , published in Nature estimated that the search engines with the largest number of Web pages indexed (such as Google or Northern Light) each index no more than sixteen per cent of the surface Web. Since they are missing the deep Web when they use such search engines, Internet searchers are therefore searching only 0.03% — or one in 3,000 — of the pages available to them today. Clearly, simultaneous searching of multiple surface and deep Web sources is necessary when comprehensive information retrieval is needed.

NTT DoCoMo Tokyo, Japan, launched the first 3G (Third Generation) cellular network.

"3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony, video calls, and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Additional features also include HSPA data transmission capabilities able to deliver speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8 Mbit/s on the uplink" (Wikipedia article on 3G, accessed 04-11-2009).

At this time there are 147,344,723 Internet hosts and 36,689,008 websites (Cisco). The estimated number of Internet users worldwide is about 600,000,000.

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issued as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. This was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on the history of these subjects.

Michael Day of UKOLN, University of Bath, published a comprehensive review of worldwide projects for preservation of web data: Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web.

Apple opened the software based, online iTunes Store.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium  (IIPC,) netpreserve.org, was founded.

"In July 2003 the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library (UK), The Library of Congress (USA) and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations. This group of 12 institutions chartered the IIPC to fund and participate in projects and working groups to accomplish the Consortium’s goals. The initial agreement was in effect for three years, during which time the membership was limited to the charter institutions. Since then, membership has expanded to include additional libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions involved in Web archiving.

"The goals of the consortium are:

" * To enable the collection, preservation and long-term access of a rich body of Internet content from around the world.

" * To foster the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards for the creation of international archives.

" * To be a strong international advocate for initiatives and legislation that encourage the collection, preservation and access to Internet content.

" * To encourage and support libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions everywhere to address Internet content collecting and preservation."

In August 2003 Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and the Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu launched the peer-to-peer voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony service, Skype. The name of the company evolved from "Sky peer-to-peer" or "Skyper." However some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken, so the final "r" was dropped leaving "Skype," for which domain names were available. Skype was sold to eBay, based in San Jose, California, in September 2005. On 10 May 2011 Microsoft purchased Skype from eBay for a supposed $8.5 billion. According to the Wikipedia Skype had 663 million registered users in September 2011.

Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo founded Metblogs.com. In May 2009 the Metroblogging website characterized this as the world's largest "network of city-focused blogs, covering local issues in more than fifty cities around the world."  On May 24, 2009 there were 57 city-specific cities and more than 700 bloggers involved in Metroblogging, representing, among other things, a kind of news-gathering and broadcasting network.

800,000,000 people in the world are using the Internet.

In May 2004 there were 50,000,000 websites on the Internet.

Programmer Bram Cohen, author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, and entrepreneur Ashwin Navin founded BitTorrent, Inc. in San Francisco.

The first Web 2.0 Conference was held in San Francisco.

"Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. . . .

Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, by November 2004 8,000,000 American adults said they had created blogs.

By Spring of 2005 it was estimated that over 100,000,000 people in China used the Internet.

The Internet Archive in San Francisco archived forty billion web pages from 1996 to 2005.

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issued From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology of original publications, reflecting the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet. Each reading is introduced by the editor.

In 2005 the FBI replaced Carnivore with commercially available network monitoring software such as NarusInsight, produced by Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

"Features of NarusInsight include:

"♦ Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet)

"♦ High-speed Packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet.

"♦ Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g. web browsers, instant messaging applications, email) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g. which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g. compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their emails).

"♦ High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.

"♦ NarusInsight's functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.

"♦ Compliance with CALEA and ETSI.

"♦ Certified by Telecommunication Engineering Center (TEC) in India for lawful intercept and monitoring systems for ISPs.

"The intercepted data flows into NarusInsight Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analyzed for surveillance and forensic analysis purposes.

"Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.

"A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.

"According to a company press release, the latest version of NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is "the industry's only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of webmail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gawab Mail (English and Arabic versions)."

"It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored" (Wikipedia article on Narus [company], accessed 01-14-2012). 

Three former employees of Paypal — Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim — founded the video sharing website, YouTube.  Its first headquarters were above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.

The U. S.- China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC.gov) issued the report of Xiao Qiang, University of California, Berkeley, on The Development and the State Control of the Chinese Internet. 

Neuroscientists Olaf Sporns of Indiana University, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, and Rolf Köttler of Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, published "The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain," PLoS Computational Biology I (4). This paper and the PhD thesis of Patric Hagmann from the Université de Lausanne, From diffusion MRI to brain connectomics, coined the term connectome:

In their 2005 paper  Sporns et al. wrote:

"To understand the functioning of a network, one must know its elements and their interconnections. The purpose of this article is to discuss research strategies aimed at a comprehensive structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain. We propose to call this dataset the human 'connectome,' and we argue that it is fundamentally important in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology. The connectome will significantly increase our understanding of how functional brain states emerge from their underlying structural substrate, and will provide new mechanistic insights into how brain function is affected if this structural substrate is disrupted."

In his 2005 Ph.D. thesis, From diffusion MRI to brain connectomics, Hagmann wrote:

"It is clear that, like the genome, which is much more than just a juxtaposition of genes, the set of all neuronal connections in the brain is much more than the sum of their individual components. The genome is an entity it-self, as it is from the subtle gene interaction that [life] emerges. In a similar manner, one could consider the brain connectome, set of all neuronal connections, as one single entity, thus emphasizing the fact that the huge brain neuronal communication capacity and computational power critically relies on this subtle and incredibly complex connectivity architecture" (Wikipedia article on Connectome, accessed 12-28-2010).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speculated that it may take three hundred years to index all the world's information and make it searchable.

" 'We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years,' Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. 'The answer is it's going to be a very long time.'

"Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed, he said earlier during his speech."

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

"a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

This was  the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

At the UC Berkeley School of Information Mitchell Kapor delivered an address entitled Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration.

"The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors."

The Wayback Machine, a digital time capsule at the Internet Archive, San Francisco, contained almost 2 petabytes of data, and was growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipsed the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

Having initially registered the domain name for free, after which he temporarily lost it to a con man, Gary Kremen won a lawsuit and sold Sex.com for Boston-based Escom LLC $14,000,000 or  "$15 million in cash and stock." This was the highest price obtained for a domain name at the time. Maybe ever?

In D-Lib Magazine researchers at Cornell University from the departments of Computer Science, Information Science, and the Cornell Theory Center described plans for A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive. The library, a super-computing application consisting of 10 billion web pages, was intended to be used by social scientists.

Vital US infrastructure, including power grids and banking systems, were put under simulated attack in a week-long security exercise called Cyber Storm.

♦ FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S PUBLISHED INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULTS

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) successfully executed Cyber Storm, the first national cyber exercise Feb. 6 thru Feb. 10, 2006. The exercise was the first government-led, full-scale cyber security exercise of its kind. NCSD, a division within the department’s Preparedness Directorate, provides the federal government with a centralized cyber security coordination and preparedness function called for in the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7. NCSD is the focal point for the federal government’s interaction with state and local government, the private sector and the international community concerning cyberspace vulnerability reduction efforts."

"The Scenario

"The exercise simulated a sophisticated cyber attack campaign through a series of scenarios directed at several critical infrastructure sectors. The intent of these scenarios was to highlight the interconnectedness of cyber systems with physical infrastructure and to exercise coordination and communication between the public and private sectors. Each scenario was developed with the assistance of industry experts and was executed in a closed and secure environment.

"Cyber Storm scenarios had three major adversarial objectives:

"* To disrupt specifically targeted critical infrastructure through cyber attacks

"* To hinder the governments' ability to respond to the cyber attacks

"* To undermine public confidence in the governments' ability to provide and protect service" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1158340980371.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

♦ A LESS OPTIMISTIC INTERPRETATION FROM THE WIKIPEDIA

"The Cyber Storm exercise was a simulated exercise overseen by the Department of Homeland Security that took place February 6 through February 10, 2006 with the purpose of testing the nations defenses against digital espionage. The simulation was targeted primarily at American security organizations but officials from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand participated as well.

"Simulation

"The exercise simulated a large scale attack on critical digital infrastructure such as communications, transportation, and energy production. The simulation took place a series of incidents which included.

" * Washington's metro trains mysteriously shutting down.

" * Bloggers revealing locations of railcars containing hazardous materials. * The airport control towers of Philadelphia and Chicago mysteriously shutting down.

" * A mysterious liquid appearing on a London subway.

" * Significant numbers of people on "no fly" lists suddenly appearing at airports all over the nation.

" * Planes flying too close to the White House. * Water utilities in Los Angeles getting compromised.

"Internal difficulties

"During the exercise the computers running the simulation came under attack by the players themselves. Heavily censored files released to the Associated Press reveal that at some time during the exercise the organizers sent every one involved an e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" telling the participants in the simulation not to attack the game's control computers.

"Performance of participants

"The Cyber Storm exercise highlighted the gaps and shortcomings of the nation's cyber defenses. The cyber storm exercise report found that institutions under attack had a hard time getting the bigger picture and instead focused on single incidents treating them as 'individual and discrete.'

"In light of the test the Department of Homeland Security raised concern that the relatively modest resources assigned to cyber-defense would be 'overwhelmed in a real attack' (Wikipedia article on Cyber Storm Exercise, accessed 08-09-2009).

Marc Weber and William B. Pickett founded the World Wide Web History Center.

In the New York Times Magazine Kevin Kelly of Pacifica, California, published Scan this Book! — an account of current developments working toward the "universal" digital library on the Internet.

"From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)"

The Chairman of Cisco systems, San Jose, California, John Chambers, compared telepresence to teleporting in Star Trek, and said it will be potentially a billion dollar market.

In August 2006 Google began introduction of web-based Google Apps productivity software.

Le Document a la Lumiere du Numerique (The Document in the Digital Era) was published in print by collaborating group of information researchers under the collective pseudonym, Roger T. Pedauque. The surname of the pseudonym meant "web-footed."

In November 2006 there were more than 100 million websites on the Internet. Between January and November of this year 27.4 million sites were added to the web. (According to Netcraft.com there were 101,435,253 sites on the Internet.)

In February 2007 Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired Magazine:

"Information is expanding 10 times faster than any product on this planet - manufactured or natural. According to Hal Varian, an economist at UC Berkeley and a consultant to Google, worldwide information is increasing at 66 percent per year - approaching the rate of Moore's Law - while the most prolific manufactured stuff - paper, let’s say, or steel - averages only as much as 7 percent annually."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a product of the PewResearch Center, Washington, D.C.,  in February 2007 about 12 million Americans maintained a blog.

On June 29, 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

Arun Kumar and others at IBM Research - India, New Delhi,  published "WWTW: The World Wide Telecom Web", an Internet designed for illiterate populations:

"our vision of a voice-driven ecosystem parallel to that of the WWW. WWTW is a network of interconnected voice sites that are voice driven applications created by users and hosted in the network. It has the potential to enable the underprivileged population to become a part of the next generation converged networked world. We present a whole gamut of existing technology enablers for our vision as well as present research directions and open challenges that need to be solved to not only realize a WWTW but also to enable the two Webs to cross leverage each other."

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting the largest cyber security exercise ever organized. Cyber Storm II is being held from March 10-14 in Washington, D.C. and brings together participants from federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the international community.

"Cyber Storm II is the second in a series of congressionally mandated exercises that will examine the nation’s cyber security preparedness and response capabilities. The exercise will simulate a coordinated cyber attack on information technology, communications, chemical, and transportation systems and assets.

" 'Securing cyberspace is vital to maintaining America’s strategic interests, public safety, and economic prosperity,' said Greg Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. 'Exercises like Cyber Storm II help to ensure that the public and private sectors are prepared for an effective response to attacks against our critical systems and networks.'

"Cyber Storm II will include 18 federal departments and agencies, nine states (Calif., Colo., Del., Ill., Mich., N.C., Pa., Texas and Va.), five countries (United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and more than 40 private sector companies. They include ABB, Inc., Air Products, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company Inc., Harris Corporation, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Microsoft, NeuStar, PPG Industries, and Wachovia" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1205180340404.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

According to World Internet Stats  in June 2008 1,463,632,361 people used the Internet, out of a  total world population of 6,676,120,288.

According to a Netcraft survey in September 2008 there were 181,277,835 active websites on the Internet.

Craigslist, the leading classified advertising service, provided free local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries, generating more than 12 billion page views per month, used by more than 50 million people each month. Craigslist users self-published more than 30 million new classified ads each month and more than 2 million new job listings each month. Each month craigslist also posted more than 100 million user postings in more than 100 topical forms. All of this it did with only 25 employees.

Because craigslist did not charge for classified advertising it replaced a large portion of the classified advertising that historically was placed in print newspapers. By doing so it substantially reduced the significant revenue that print newspapers historically generated from classified advertising. This contributed to an overall reduction of profits for many print newspapers. Similarly, craigslist's policy of charging below-market rates for job listings impacted that traditional source of newspaper revenue, and impacted profits at physical employment agencies, and the more expensive online employment agencies.

On September 23, 2008 T-Mobile, headquartered in Bonn, Germany, announced the first cell phone powered by the Android operating system, developed by Google in association with the Open Handset Alliance.

The Authors Guild, New York, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Washington, D.C., and New York, and Google announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement "on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books – Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books – Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online – Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries – Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project."

Apart from the historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, from the standpoint of the history of information and media, one element of this election and the campaign that preceded it was the blending of its coverage by broadcast media and the rapidly evolving interactive media on the Internet. Television networks repeatedly referred viewers to their websites for interactive news stories and additional information. While we watched the election on television or listened to radio we received information in emails, from websites, and from blogging and microblogging sites like Twitter. Within minutes after the election was decided I received an email from the Obama campaign signed by Barack Obama. Online newspapers updated election results in real time. Perhaps most remarkably, even the Wikipedia article on the United States presidential election 2008 was updated in real time on the web as election results were available. This I learned from reading a blog in The New York Times online—an online newspaper blogging about an article in an online encyclopedia. From the standpoint of the history of media this represents a blurring or blending of the historic distinctions that evolved over centuries between news media writing about the moment, and traditionally more static works of reference such as encyclopedias.

An email from info@barackobama.com received 10-04-08 8:18PM PST, 18 minutes after polls closed on the West coast and news media computers declared an Obama victory. Presumbably this email was sent to the millions of people who donated to Obama's campaign:

"Jeremy --

I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.
We just made history.
And I don't want you to forget how we did it.
You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change.
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next.
But I want to be very clear about one thing...
All of this happened because of you.
Thank you,

Barack"

The day after the presdidential election President-Elect Barack Obama launched the website, Change.gov to communicate details of the transition to the presidency.

Stanford University Libraries' HighWire Press, announced over the DIGLIB newsgroup that it 

"reached a significant milestone this week with the posting of the five millionth article on its e-Publishing platform.  HighWire, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, provides technology and customized online services to 140 publishing partners ranging from independent non-profit societies and associations, to university presses and large commercial publishers.

"The milestone occurred while loading a substantial amount of journal backfiles on behalf of the American Medical Association. Bringing the HighWire total article count over the 5 million mark was an article dating from 1884, “Dermatitis Herpetiformis” by Louis A. Duhring, MD1, published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. The JAMA & Archives Journals Backfiles Collection will ensure that 125 years of high quality medical research will be available online at the journals’ Web sites on the HighWire platform."

At this time Highwire Press

"hosts the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1186 journals and 5,006,835 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made 2,015,269 articles free. With our partner publishers we produce 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals."

"BEIJING, China (CNN) -- China surpassed the United States in 2008 as the world's top user of the Internet, according to a government-backed research group.

"The number of Web surfers in the country grew by nearly 42 percent to 298 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center's January report. And there's plenty of room for growth, as only about 1 in every 4 Chinese has Internet access.  

"The rapid growth in China's Internet use can be tied to its swift economic gains and the government's push for the construction of telephone and broadband lines in the country's vast rural areas, the report says.  

"The Chinese government wants phone and broadband access in each village by 2010.

"Nearly 91 percent of China's Internet users are surfing the Web with a broadband connection -- an increase of 100 million from 2007. Mobile phone Internet users totaled 118 million by the end of 2008" (http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/14/china.internet/index.html, accessed 01-13-2010).

Ipoque, based in Leipzig, Germany, estimated that in February 2009 BitTorrent, based in San Francisco, California, was responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic and 27-55% of all Internet traffic, depending on geographical location.

According to the article referenced below, the entire archived content of the Internet occupied three petabytes (3 x 1000 terabytes) in April 2009. 

It is thought that one human brain may store roughly one petabyte. Though there may be some similarity in storage capacity between the quantity of information on the Internet and information stored in the human brain, quantity is the main point of similarity, since the information is stored and processed in totally different ways by people and computers.

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, "Guest Column: Computers vs. Brains," New York Times Blogs, 03-31-2009.

According to the New York Times, the government of Australia, Canberra, said that it

"would create a publicly owned company to build a national high- speed broadband network, spending 43 billion Australian dollars in one of the largest state-sponsored Internet infrastructure upgrades in the world. 

"Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the eight-year, $31 billion project would create up to 37,000 jobs at the peak of construction, giving a lift to the economy as retail spending slumps and mining companies cut workers amid weakening demand for Australian metals. The plan is 'the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government,' Mr. Rudd told reporters.

"The government’s announcement was a surprise rebuff to five private telecommunications firms, including Optus of Singapore and Axia NetMedia of Canada, that had been bidding to build a slower, less expensive network, with fiber-optic cables reaching as far as local nodes, worth around 10 billion dollars.

"But Mr. Rudd scrapped those proposals in favor of a superior but more expensive network that will deliver broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits per second — fast enough to download multiple movies simultaneously — to 90 percent of Australian buildings through fiber-optic cables that extend directly to the premises. The remaining 10 percent will receive upgraded wireless access."

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China  issued a directive that, as of July 1, 2009, Green Dam Youth Escort (simplified Chinese: 绿坝-花季护航) must be pre-installed on, or shipped on a compact disc with, all personal computers sold in the mainland of the People's Republic of China, including those imported from abroad.

Using the Golden Shield Project, sometimes called the "Great Firewall of China," China regularly restricted access to certain Internet sites and information that the government deemed sensitive.

"Critics fear this new software could be used by the government to enhance internet censorship. The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the development was 'very unfortunate'. Ed Black, CCIA president criticised the move as 'clearly an escalation of attempts to limit access and the freedom of the internet, [...with] economic and trade as well as cultural and social ramifications.' Black said the Chinese were attempting to 'not only control their own citizens' access to the internet but to force everybody into being complicit and participate in a level of censorship'.

"On 8 June, Microsoft said that appropriate parental control tools was 'an important societal consideration'. However, 'we agree with others in industry and around the world that important issues such as freedom of expression, privacy, system reliability and security need to be properly addressed.'

"A spokesman for the Foreign ministry said the software would filter out pornography or violence. "The Chinese government pushes forward the healthy development of the internet. But it lawfully manages the internet," he added.

"On 11 June, a BBC News article reported that potential faults in the software could lead to a large-scale disaster: The report included comments by Isaac Mao, who said that there were 'a series of software flaws', including the unencrypted communications between the software and the company's servers, which could allow hackers access to people's private data or place malicious script on machines on the network to "affect [a] large scale disaster' " (Wikipedia article on Green Dam Youth Escort, accessed 06-11-2009).

At the Google IO Developers Conference in San Francisco Google demonstrated Google Wave, "an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent email and Internet communication in general" developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed Google Maps.  The opensource program would be available to developers worldwide.

The Google Wave demonstration is available on a 1.5 hour video available on YouTube. When I accessed the video on June 1, 2009 it had already been downloaded 1,173,600 times and had already received 3,225 ratings.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), netpreserve. org published the WARC file format as an international standard: ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation—WARC file format.

"For many years, heritage organizations have tried to find the most appropriate ways to collect and keep track of World Wide Web material using web-scale tools such as web crawlers. At the same time, these organizations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitized files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange. Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.

"The WARC format is expected to be a standard way to structure, manage and store billions of resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format , which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web. WARC format offers new possibilities, notably the recording of HTTP request headers, the recording of arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol" (http://netpreserve.org/press/pr20090601.php).

Solid Oak Software Inc, developer of CyberSitter, alleged that an Internet-filtering program called Green Dam Youth Escort produced in China and mandated by the Chinese government, contained stolen portions of the company's code.

"Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348705,00.asp, accessed 06-13-2009).

Solid Oak Software Inc. said it will try to stop PC makers from shipping computers with the software.

"Solid Oak said Friday that it found pieces of its CyberSitter filtering software in the Chinese program, including a list of terms to be blocked, instructions for updating the software, and an old news bulletin promoting CyberSitter. Researchers at the University of Michigan who have been studying the Chinese program also said they found components of CyberSitter, including the blacklist of terms.

"Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the Chinese company that made the filtering software, denied stealing anything. "That's impossible," said Bryan Zhang, Jinhui's founder, in response to Solid Oak's charges.

"The allegations come as PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are sorting through a mandate by the Chinese government requiring that all PCs sold in China as of July come with the filtering software. Representatives of the two big U.S. companies said they are working with trade associations to monitor new developments related to the Chinese software" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124486910756712249.html, accessed 06-13-2009).

According to Internetworldstats.com there were about 1,733,993,000 Internet users on September 30, 2009. This compared with about 360,985,000 on December 31, 2000.

Arbor Networks, Chelmsford, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network presented the findings of the Internet Observatory Report at the North American Network Operators Group NANOG47 in Dearborn, Michigan:

"• The report is believed to be the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s. The report offers analysis of two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers.

"• At its peak, the study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second and a total of more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic over the two-year life of the study.

"• The Internet Observatory Report includes a discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; and a concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends.

Key Findings:

"• Evolution of the Internet Core: Over the last five years, Internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional Internet core of 10 to 12 Tier-1 international transit providers. Today, the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenter / CDNs and consumer networks. Consequently, most Tier-1 networks have evolved their business models away from IP wholesale transit to focus on broader cloud / enterprise services, content hosting and VPNs.

"• Rise of the ‘Hyper Giants’: Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world. Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – “hyper giants” like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

"• Applications Migrate to the Web: Historically, Internet applications communicated across a panoply of application specific protocols and communication stacks. Today, the majority of Internet application traffic has migrated to an increasingly small number of web and video protocols, including video over web and Adobe Flash. Other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years.

"• A New Internet Ecosystem: Over the last five years, macroeconomic forces have radically transformed the global Internet commercial ecosystem. Economic changes, including the collapse of wholesale IP transit and the dramatic growth in advertisement-supported service, reversed decade-old business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers. A wave of innovation is ongoing, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs. This change in the Internet business ecosystem has significant ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research."

According to Arbor Networks' 2009 Atlas Observatory Report Google accounted for 6 percent of all Internet traffic of every type. 

"And how many would have heard of a company called Carpathia Hosting? Its MegaUpload, MeaErotik, MegaClick and MegaVideo services have turned it into a company that now accounts for 1 percent of all Internet traffic, says Arbor, and this will doubtless grow. The important takeaway is that few of these companies had even been heard of two years ago, and very few of them are big telcos. To put all this into perspective, in 2007 Arbor found that the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic was accounted for by 30,000 entities, with fifty percent of traffic accounted for by around 10,000 companies.

"Only two years later that same fifty percent now runs through only 150 top 'content delivery networks' (CDNs), an astonishing consolidation made more remarkable by the fact that Internet traffic has grown significantly during that time.

" 'Up to 2007, The Internet meant connecting to lots of servers and data centres around the world,' notes Arbor's chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. Now there are barely 100 companies that matter. Traffic patterns tend to be hidden, mainly because the companies losing out - the traditional telcos and ISPs - don't exactly have an interest in advertising their waning status. The reason for their decline in importance is that Internet traffic is being driven by huge providers with access to content such as video.

" 'For 150 years, they [BT and other telcos] have had the same business model. Now everyone is trying to get away from being a dumb pipe.' Arbor's Atlas Internet Observatory report crunched traffic from 100 of the Internet's largest entities, accounting for 12 Terabytes of peak throughput, equivalent to about a quarter of the Internet's total at any one moment, said Labovitz.The importance of this is not simply that a small number of companies will account for a lot of traffic, but that these companies are increasingly what the Internet actually is. The Internet up to around 2007 was dominated by a hierarchy of companies, co-operating with one another to allow traffic to be passed from one to the other, regardless of size. The new Internet superpowers, in stark contrast, bypass a lot of this and use direct connections from one to the other. If a company is not part of this new core, it could find itself increasingly passed to the 'long tail', a polite way of saying they will be shoved to the fringe.  

"Video, including video that runs over web/http, now accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic, and is one reason all these direct connections between large data centres are now necessary. IPv6 traffic remains tiny at only 0.03 percent of traffic, but is showing sudden and possibly rapid growth in recent months thanks to deployments by named hosters.  

"Interestingly, P2P is in rapid decline, falling from around 3 percent of all traffic in 2007 to only half a percent now. Again, downloaders appear to prefer direct connectivity for downloads, mostly through port 80 and the web" (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/14/internet-now-dominated-traffic-superpowers)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to allow Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets.

"The decision is a 'historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,' said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive. 'We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.' 

"This change affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, Icann’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.  

"Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with 'country codes,' the designators at the end of an address name, like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, Icann said.

"Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge.  'I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,' Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. 'Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.'  

"The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for Icann to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names Nov. 16. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand for the new 'internationalized' domain name system has been among the strongest, Icann officials say. Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said.  

"This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/technology/31net.html?hp)

"Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

"First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.  

"Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

"Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.  

"We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this Report to Congress (PDF) by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see p. 163-), as well as a related analysis (PDF) prepared for the Commission, Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

 "We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.  

"We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that 'we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.'

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

"First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.  

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web. . .

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. For example, in the screen shot, the big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under "News results." Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the 'Latest results' feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.

Click on 'Latest results' or select 'Latest' from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only 'Updates' from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.  

And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added 'hot topics' to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.  

"Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

"Exploit code for the zero-day hole in Internet Explorer linked to the China-based attacks on Google and other companies has been released on the Internet, Microsoft and McAfee warned on Friday.

"Meanwhile, the German federal security agency issued a statement on Friday urging its citizens to use an alternative browser to IE until a patch arrives.  

" 'We still only see limited targeted attacks affecting Internet Explorer 6,' Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager lead at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a statement. 'While newer versions of Internet Explorer are affected by this vulnerability, mitigations exist that make exploitation much more difficult.'

"McAfee researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed that it has been published on at least one Web site, the company's Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz wrote in his blog. 'The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week,' he said.

" 'The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability,' Kurtz wrote. 'The now-public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit.' Microsoft issued a warning on Thursday about the new hole and said it was working on a patch. The vulnerability affects IE 6, 7 and 8 on all the modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, according to Microsoft's advisory. Microsoft said IE 6 was the browser version being used on the computers that were targeted in the attacks. Google disclosed the attacks targeting it and other U.S. companies on Tuesday and said the attacks originated in China. Human rights activists who use Gmail also were targeted, Google said.

"The company said it discovered the attacks in mid-December and while it did not specifically implicate the Chinese government, it says that as a result of the incidents, it may withdraw from doing business in China. Sources familiar with the attack code say the attacks are similar to previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were linked to the Chinese government or proxies operating for the government. Source code was stolen from some of the more than 30 Silicon Valley companies targeted in the attack, sources said. Adobe has confirmed that it was targeted by an attack, and sources have said Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical also were targets.

"McAfee says references in the IE-related attack code it analyzed indicate that the attackers called the operation 'Aurora' and that the attack was extremely sophisticated" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10436083-245.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

On the sixth anniversary of the founding of Facebook on February 4, 2010 Mark Zuckerberg announced that it had 400,000,000 users:

"Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.  

"Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.  

"For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises. 

"Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.  

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.  

"After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you" (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=287542162130, accessed 02-10-2010).

Google announced in its blog that it stopped censoring search services on Google.cn, and moved its Chinese search business from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.

"Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, accessed 03-22-2010)

Twitter announced in its blog that it would donate to the Library of Congress its archive of 10,000,000,000 text messages (tweets) accumulated since the founding of the company in October 2006:

"The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library's primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

"Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.  

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.  

"Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber's latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!"

"Over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about exactly what information Google Street View cars collect as they drive our streets. While we have talked about the collection of WiFi data a number of times before--and there have been stories published in the press--we thought a refresher FAQ pulling everything together in one place would be useful. This blog also addresses concerns raised by data protection authorities in Germany.

"What information are your cars collecting? 

"We collect the following information--photos, local WiFi network data and 3-D building imagery. This information enables us to build new services, and improve existing ones. Many other companies have been collecting data just like this for as long as, if not longer, than Google.

"♦Photos: so that we can build Street View, our 360 degree street level maps. Photos like these are also being taken by TeleAtlas and NavTeq for Bing maps. In addition, we use this imagery to improve the quality of our maps, for example by using shop, street and traffic signs to refine our local business listings and travel directions;

"♦WiFi network information: which we use to improve location-based services like search and maps. Organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute and Skyhook already collect this information globally;

"♦and 3-D building imagery: we collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners) which help us improve our maps. NavTeq also collects this information in partnership with Bing. As does TeleAtlas.

"What do you mean when you talk about WiFi network information?

"WiFi networks broadcast information that identifies the network and how that network operates. That includes SSID data (i.e. the network name) and MAC address (a unique number given to a device like a WiFi router).

"Networks also send information to other computers that are using the network, called payload data, but Google does not collect or store payload data.*  

"But doesn’t this information identify people? 

"MAC addresses are a simple hardware ID assigned by the manufacturer. And SSIDs are often just the name of the router manufacturer or ISP with numbers and letters added, though some people do also personalize them. However, we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars.  

"Is it, as the German DPA states, illegal to collect WiFi network information? 

"We do not believe it is illegal--this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a WiFi-enabled device. Companies like Skyhook have been collecting this data cross Europe for longer than Google, as well as organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute.  

"Why did you not tell the DPAs that you were collecting WiFi network information?

"Given it was unrelated to Street View, that it is accessible to any WiFi-enabled device and that other companies already collect it, we did not think it was necessary. However, it’s clear with hindsight that greater transparency would have been better.  

"Why is Google collecting this data?

"The data which we collect is used to improve Google’s location based services, as well as services provided by the Google Geo Location API. For example, users of Google Maps for Mobile can turn on “My Location” to identify their approximate location based on cell towers and WiFi access points which are visible to their device. Similarly, users of sites like Twitter can use location based services to add a geo location to give greater context to their messages.  

"Can this data be used by third parties? 

"Yes--but the only data which Google discloses to third parties through our Geo Location API is a triangulated geo code, which is an approximate location of the user’s device derived from all location data known about that point. At no point does Google publicly disclose MAC addresses from its database (in contrast with some other providers in Germany and elsewhere).

"Do you publish this information?

"No" (http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-google-cars.html, accessed 05-23-2012).

On June 9, 2010 Google announced in its Official Blog that it had "mistakenly included code" in its software that collected "samples of payload data" from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from encrypted WiFI networks.  It also announced that in response to requests from the Irish Data Protection Authority it was deleting payload data collected from Irish WiFi networks.

"Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.  

"Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories on Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.

"Registrations for websites to use those names are to begin soon. On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix" (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_EGYPT_ARAB_DOMAIN_NAMES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT, accessed 05-16-2010).

According to The New York Times, in May 2010 people were using their cell phones more for text messaging and data-processing than for speech. This should not come as a surprise to anyone with teen-age children.

". . . although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.  

"This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.  

"Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.  

"The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say. 'Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,' said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. 'But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.'  

"Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. 'Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,' said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.  

"But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html?hp, accessed 05-14-2010).

"The high water mark for spam was reached in July 2010 when approximately 230 billion spam messages were in circulation each day, accounting for 90% of all email traffic. This has now declined to 39.2 billion messages per day, accounting for only 72.9% of all email. The question is why?

"There are many different factors that appear to be working together to make sending spam more difficult and less profitable for criminal gangs. In September 2010 the Spamit web site announced that it was ceasing operation due to “numerous negative events”. Spamit provided affiliate marketing services, allegedly helping to pay spammers for promoting many spam advertised web sites, notably the “Canadian Pharmacy” operation which was one of the most spam advertised brands.  

"The demise of Spamit corresponded with a large drop in spam volumes, from approximately 100 to 75 billion spam per day from the end of September to mid November 2010. It is not known exactly what the “negative events” are referred to by Spamit, but it is thought that these may be associated with increased attention by regulatory bodies and law enforcement in the activities of the group.  

"Nevertheless, spam had been dropping before this event. It may be that increased surveillance of spammers by authorities had pursuaded spammers to seek other economic activities legitimate or illicit. Or it may be that the peak of spamming in July 2010 was unsustainable for the spamming industry, there just weren't the number of customers to warrant such a high level of activity.

"A few months later, in December 2010, the largest botnet at the time, Rustock suddenly stopped sending spam. At the time, this single botnet was responsible for 47.5% of all spam, sending approximately 44.1 billion spams per day. The botnet soon resumed its activity in January in 2011, but in March it ceased operation entirely and was dismantled due to concerted action by a partnership of industry and law enforcement. Since then, the other botnets have not significantly increased their spamming activity to maintain the same total levels of spam. Indeed, one of the largest botnets, Bagle, has decreased the amount of spam that it sends from 8.31 billion spam per day in March 2011 to 1.60 billion spam per day in June 2011.

"This decrease in spamming activity may be evidence that increased investigation of the spam underworld has both disrupted the affiliate networks, such as Spamit, that pay for spam campaigns, and led to botnet controllers looking to keep their heads down to avoid the attention of the legal authorities. Interestingly, during the same period there has been a reported rise in distributed denial of service attacks, which can also be undertaken by botnets. It may be that the botnet owners are looking to other modes of operation to maintain their revenue, while moving away from the now less profitable and more risky business of spamming" (http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/why-my-email-went, accessed 07-04-2011).

"The volume of data on the world’s mobile networks is doubling each year, according to Cisco Systems, the U.S. maker of routers and networking equipment. By 2014, it estimates, the monthly data flow will increase about sixteenfold, to 3.6 billion gigabytes from 220.1 million" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02iht-NETPIPE02.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/business/global/index.jsonp, accessed 08-01-2010)

"Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, the first panel featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As moderator David Kirkpatrick was introducing him, he rattled off a massive stat.

"Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.  

Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.  

“ 'The real issue is user-generated content,' Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.  

"Naturally, all of this information helps Google. But he cautioned that just because companies like his can do all sorts of things with this information, the more pressing question now is if they should. Schmidt noted that while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming.  

"Facebook was not only the most searched item of the year, but it passed Google as America’s most-visited website in 2010, according to a new report from Experian Hitwise.  

"For the second year in a row, 'facebook' was the top search term among U.S. Internet users. The search term accounted for 2.11% of all searches, according to Hitwise. Even more impressive is the fact that three other variations of Facebook made it into the top 10: “facebook login” at #2, 'facebook.com' at #6 and “www.facebook.com” at #9. Combined, they accounted for 3.48% of all searches, a 207% increase from Facebook’s position last year.  

"Rounding out the list of top search terms were YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, eBay, Yahoo and Mapquest. Other companies that made big moves in terms of searches include Hulu, Netflix, Verizon and ESPN. The search term “games” also made its first appearance in the list of Hitwise’s top 50 search terms.  

"More interesting though is Facebook’s ascension to number one on Hitwise’s list of most-visited websites. The social network accounted for 8.93% of all U.S. visits in 2010 (January-November), beating Google (7.19%), Yahoo Mail (3.52%), Yahoo (3.30%) and YouTube (2.65%). However, Facebook didn’t beat the traffic garnered by all of Google’s properties combined (9.85%).  

"It’s only a matter of time until Facebook topples the entire Google empire, though. We’ve seen the trend develop for months: Facebook is getting bigger than Google. According to comScore, Facebook’s U.S. traffic grew by 55% in the last year and has shown no sign of slowing down" (http://mashable.com/2010/12/29/2010-the-year-facebook-dethroned-google-as-king-of-the-web-stats/, accessed 12-31-2010).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann.org) announced that the last remaining IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) Internet addresses from the central pool of about 4.3 billlion were allocated.

The next Internet protocol, IPv6, will open up a pool of Internet addresses that is a billion-trillion times larger than the total pool of IPv4 addresses--a supply that should be sufficient for the foreseeable future. 

According to an article in The New York Times, two billion people in the world used the Internet regularly.

In rural America only 60% had broadband connections. 

"Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all."

The National Broadband Map (NBM), a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States, was first published.

The NBM was created by the U. S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia. The NBM is a project of NTIA's State Broadband Initiative. The NBM will be updated approximately every six months. 

Harvard Law professor, and Vice Dean, Library and Information Services, John Palfrey of the OpenNet Initiative wrote in "Middle East Conflict and and Internet Tipping Point" that the OpenNet Initiative had divided the way in which states filtered and practice surveillance over the Internet into four phases: "open Internet," "access denied," "access controlled," and "access contested."

"The first is the 'open Internet' period, from the network's birth through about 2000. In this period, there were few restrictions on the network globally. There was even an argument about whether the network could itself be regulated. This sense of unfettered freedom is a distant memory today.

"In the 'access denied' period that followed, through about 2005, states like China, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and dozens of others began to block access to certain information online. They developed technical Internet filtering modes to stop people from reaching certain websites, commonly including material deemed sensitive for political, cultural, or religious reasons.

"The most recent period, 'access controlled,' through 2010 or so, was characterized by the growth in the sophistication with which states began to control the flow of information online. Internet filtering grew in scope and scale, especially throughout Asia, the former Soviet states, and the Middle East and North Africa. Techniques to use the network for surveillance grew dramatically, as did "just-in-time" blocking approaches such as the use of distributed denial-of-service attacks against undesirable content. Overall, states got much more effective at pushing back on the use of the Internet by those who wished to share information broadly and for prodemocratic purposes.

"Today, we are entering a period that we should call 'access contested.' Activists around the world are pushing back on the denial of access and controls put in place by states that wish to restrict the free flow of information. This round of the contest, at least in the Middle East and North Africa, is being won by those who are using the network to organize against autocratic regimes. Online communities such as Herdict.org and peer-to-peer technologies like mesh networking provide specific ways for people to get involved directly in shaping how these technologies develop around the world" (http://www.technologyreview.com/web/32437/?p1=A1, accessed 02-28-2011).

In March 2011 peer1 hosting (peer1.com), headquartered in Vancouver, B. C., issued The Map of the Internet, a visual representation of all the networks around the world that were interconnected to form the Interent. These included small and large Interent service providers (ISPs), Internet exchange points, university networks, and organization entworks such as Facebook and Google. The size of the nodes and the thickness of the interconnecting lines reflected the size of particular providers in relation to one another. This map was produced as a two-dimension poster that could be downloaded from their website.

"Geek Version – You’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the Internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighboring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems are based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central. This is the same graph-theoretical concept that forms the basis of Google’s PageRank algorithm. The Map of the Internet image layout begins with the most central nodes and proceeds to the least, positioning them on a grid that subdivides after each order of magnitude of centrality. Within the constraints of the current subdivision level, nodes are placed as near as possible to previously-placed nodes that they are connected to" (http://www.peer1.com/blog/2011/03/map-of-the-internet-2011, accessed 03-14-2013).

Two years later, in March 2013, peer1 issued their Map of the Internet as a free iPhone app.  This visually distinctive and beautiful interactive app, based on data provided by The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (caida) allowed users to:

• Zoom and pan to enlarge or rotate the map in 3D

• Tap on nodes to learn more about them

• Browse historical data and events that shaped the Internet

• Perform a traceroute to a node from your network

• Search for companies or domains

• Change views to see geographic or hierarchical maps

In March 2011 Google processed 1,000,000,000 search queries per day.

" . . . the future of search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, according to computer scientists, will be to exploit advances in machine learning and language processing to become answer machines — to take a page from Watson, but as a consumer service. Both companies are already headed in that direction" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/weekinreview/06lohr.html?pagewanted=2&hpw, accessed 03-06-2011)

In its acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion Microsoft acquired a company founded in 2003, which never made money, changed hands many times, and came with substantial debt. 

The purchase price was roughly ten times the $860 million revenue of the company in 2010. Skype's debt was $686 million — not a problem for Microsoft.

Microsoft paid such a premium for the company because at the time of purchase Skype was growing at the rate of 500,000 new registered users per day, had 170 million connected users, with 30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently. Volume of communications over the platform totaled 209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010.

"Services like Skype can cut into the carriers’ revenues because they offer easy ways to make phone calls, videoconference and send messages free over the Internet, encroaching on the ways that phone companies have traditionally made money" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/technology/16phone.html?hpw, accessed 05-16-2011).

In May 2011 video streaming company Netflix, headquartered in Los Gatos, California, was the largest source of Internet traffic in North America, accounting for 29.7 percent of peak downstream traffic. The company was also the largest overall source of Internet traffic.

"Currently, real-time entertainment applications consume 49.2 percent of peak aggregate traffic - up from 29.5 percent in 2009. And the company forecasts that the category will account for as much as 60 percent of peak aggregate traffic by the end of this year.

"And in Europe, the figure's even higher. Overall, individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans" (http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-features/56015-netflix-becomes-biggest-source-of-internet-traffic, accessed 05-18-2011). 

 McKinsey research into the Internet economies of the G-8 nations as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden found that the web accounted for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. If measured as a sector, Internet-related consumption and expenditure were bigger than agriculture or energy. On average, the Internet contributed 3.4 percent to GDP in the 13 countries covered by the research—an amount the size of Spain or Canada in terms of GDP, and growing at a faster rate than that of Brazil.

"Research prepared by the McKinsey Global Institute and McKinsey's Technology, Media and Telecommunications Practices as part of a knowledge partnership with the e-G8 Forum, offers the first quantitative assessment of the impact of the Internet on GDP and growth, while also considering the most relevant tools governments and businesses can use to get the most benefit from the digital transformation. To assess the Internet's contribution to the global economy, the report analyzes two primary sources of value: consumption and supply. The report draws on a macroeconomic approach used in national accounts to calculate the contribution of GDP; a statistical econometric approach; and a microeconomic approach, analyzing the results of a survey of 4,800 small and medium-size enterprises in a number of different countries.  

"The Internet's impact on global growth is rising rapidly. The Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among the developed countries MGI studied, a sharp acceleration from the 10 percent contribution over 15 years. Most of the economic value created by the Internet falls outside of the technology sector, with 75 percent of the benefits captured by companies in more traditional industries. The Internet is also a catalyst for job creation. Among 4,800 small and medium-size enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology-related efficiencies.

"The United States is the largest player in the global Internet supply ecosystem, capturing more than 30 percent of global Internet revenues and more than 40 percent of net income. It is also the country with the most balanced structure within the global ecosystem among the 13 countries studied, garnering relatively equal contributions from hardware, software and services, and telecommunications. The United Kingdom and Sweden are changing the game, in part driven by the importance and the performance of their telecom operators. India and China are strengthening their position in the global Internet ecosystem rapidly with growth rates of more than 20 percent. France, Canada, and Germany have an opportunity to leverage their strong Internet usage to increase their presence in the supply ecosystem. Other Asian countries are rapidly accelerating their influence on the Internet economy at faster rates than Japan. Brazil, Russia and Italy are in the early stages of Internet supply. They have strong potential for growth" (http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Internet_matters, accessed 01-19-2012).

John F. Gantz and David Reinsell of International Data Corporation (IDC) published a summary of their annual study of the digital universe on the fifth anniversary of their study:

"We always knew it was big – in 2010 cracking the zettabyte barrier. In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) - growing by a factor of 9 in just five years.

"But, as digital universe cosmologists, we have also uncovered a number of other things — some predictable, some astounding, and some just plain disturbing.

"While 75% of the information in the digital universe is generated by individuals, enterprises have some liability for 80% of information in the digital universe at some point in its digital life. The number of "files," or containers that encapsulate the information in the digital universe, is growing even faster than the information itself as more and more embedded systems pump their bits into the digital cosmos. In the next five years, these files will grow by a factor of 8, while the pool of IT staff available to manage them will grow only slightly. Less than a third of the information in the digital universe can be said to have at least minimal security or protection; only about half the information that should be protected is protected.

"The amount of information individuals create themselves — writing documents, taking pictures, downloading music, etc. — is far less than the amount of information being created about them in the digital universe.

"The growth of the digital universe continues to outpace the growth of storage capacity. But keep in mind that a gigabyte of stored content can generate a petabyte or more of transient data that we typically don't store (e.g., digital TV signals we watch but don't record, voice calls that are made digital in the network backbone for the duration of a call).  

"So, like our physical universe, the digital universe is something to behold — 1.8 trillion gigabytes in 500 quadrillion "files" — and more than doubling every two years. That's nearly as many bits of information in the digital universe as stars in our physical universe" (http://idcdocserv.com/1142, accessed 08-09-2011).

♦ In August 2011 a video presentation of John Gantz delivering his summary speech was available at this link: http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/emc-digital-universe-2011/index.htm

According to Google's doubleclick ad planner list of The 1000 most visited sites on the web, Facebook, the most visited website in the world, served 1 trillion page views to 860,000,000 unique visitors in June 2011.

In one of the more ironic developments since the Internet, the Internet Archive is creating a Physical Archive in Richmond, California, of all books they scanned that they did not have to return to institutional libraries, and of other physical books as well. Their goal is to collect "one coy of every book." Their purposes in doing this are that the physical books are authentic and original versions that can be used in the future, and "If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined." The physical books are being being stored in the most compact archival fashion in environmentally controlled shipping containers placed in warehouses—not in the way an institutional library would store them if they had to provide regular access.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive explained the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive:

"Digital technologies are changing both how library materials are accessed and increasingly how library materials are preserved. After the Internet Archive digitizes a book from a library in order to provide free public access to people world-wide, these books go back on the shelves of the library. We noticed an increasing number of books from these libraries moving books to 'off site repositories'  to make space in central buildings for more meeting spaces and work spaces. These repositories have filled quickly and sometimes prompt the de-accessioning of books. A library that would prefer to not be named was found to be thinning their collections and throwing out books based on what had been digitized by Google. While we understand the need to manage physical holdings, we believe this should be done thoughtfully and well.  

"Two of the corporations involved in major book scanning have sawed off the bindings of modern books to speed the digitizing process. Many have a negative visceral reaction to the “butchering” of books, but is this a reasonable reaction?  

"A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future.  

"As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.  

"There is also a connection between digitized collections and physical collections. The libraries we scan in, rarely want more digital books than the digital versions that we scan from their collections. This struck us as strange until we better understood the craftsmanship required in putting together great collections of books, whether physical or digital. As we are archiving the books, we are carefully recording with the physical book what the identifier for the virtual version, and attaching information to the digital version of where the physical version resides. 

"Therefore we have determined that we will keep a copy of the books we digitize if they are not returned to another library. Since we are interested in scanning one copy of every book ever published, we are starting to collect as many books as we can" (http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/, accessed 06-09-2011).

"Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special.  

"And perhaps essential. What if, for example, digitization improves and we need to copy the books again?  

“ 'Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information,' Mr. Kahle noted, 'but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/technology/internet-archives-repository-collects-thousands-of-books.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25, accessed 03-30-2012).

"Anyone with Internet access can generate online content and influence public opinion, according to popular belief. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the social Web is becoming more of a playground for the affluent than a digital democracy.

"Despite the proliferation of social media – with Twitter and Facebook touted as playing pivotal roles in such pro-democracy movements as the Arab Spring – the bulk of today’s blogs, websites and video-sharing sites represent the perspectives of college-educated, Web 2.0-savvy users, the study says.

“ 'Having Internet access is not enough. Even among people online, those who are digital producers are much more likely to have higher incomes and educational levels,' said Jen Schradie, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and author of the study published in the May online issue of Poetics, a Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts. 

"Schradie, a researcher at the campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media, analyzed data from more than 41,000 American adults surveyed between 2000 and 2008 in the Pew Internet and American Life Project. She found that college graduates are 1.5 times more likely to be bloggers than are high school graduates; twice as likely to post photos and videos and three times more likely to post an online rating or comment.  

"Overall, the study found, less than 10 percent of the U.S. population is participating in most online production activities, and having a college degree is a greater predictor of who will generate publicly available online content than being young and white" (http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/06/07/digital-democracy/, accessed 0612-2011).

♦ You can watch a video presentation by Jen Schradie on The Digital Production Gap on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-029CXbeOjY

Journalist Kathryn Schultz began publishing a column called The Mechanic Muse in The New York Times on applications of computing technology to scholarship about literature. Her first column, titled "What is Distant Reading?", concerned work to date by Stanford English and Comparative Literature professor Franco Moretti and team at the Stanford Literary Lab.

"We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let’s say you pick up a copy of 'Jude the Obscure,' become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.

"The Lit Lab seeks to put this controversial theory into practice (or, more aptly, this practice into practice, since distant reading is less a theory than a method). In its January pamphlet, for instance, the team fed 30 novels identified by genre into two computer programs, which were then asked to recognize the genre of six additional works. Both programs succeeded — one using grammatical and semantic signals, the other using word frequency. At first glance, that’s only medium-interesting, since people can do this, too; computers pass the genre test, but fail the 'So what?' test. It turns out, though, that people and computers identify genres via very different features. People recognize, say, Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like 'tremble' and 'ruin.' Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like . . . 'the. Now, that’s interesting. It suggests that genres 'possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.' More important for the Lit Lab, it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect.  

"The lab’s newest paper seeks to detect these hidden aspects in plots (primarily in Hamlet) by transforming them into networks. To do so, Moretti, the sole author, turns characters into nodes ('vertices' in network theory) and their verbal exchanges into connections ('edges'). A lot goes by the wayside in this transformation, including the content of those exchanges and all of Hamlet’s soliloquies (i.e., all interior experience); the plot, so to speak, thins. But Moretti claims his networks 'make visible specific ‘regions’ within the plot' and enable experimentation. (What happens to Hamlet if you remove Horatio?). . . ." (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html?pagewanted=2, accessed 06-25-2011).

On August 15, 2011 Google announced that it agreed to acquire the smart-phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility, headquarted in Libertyville, Illinois, for $12,5 billion. This was Google's largest acquisition to date.

"In a statement, Google said the deal was largely driven by the need to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio, which it said would help it defend Android against legal threats from competitors armed with their own patents. This issue has come to the fore since a consortium of technology companies led by Apple and Microsoft purchased more than 6,000 mobile-device-related patents from Nortel Networks for about $4.5 billion, in early July. Battle lines are being drawn around patents, as companies seek to protect their interests in the competitive mobile industry through litigation as well as innovation.  

"However, as people increasingly access the Web via mobile devices, the acquisition could also help Google remain central to their Web experience in the years to come. As Apple has demonstrated with its wildly popular iPhone, this is far easier to achieve if a company can control the hardware, as well as the software, people carry in their pockets. Comments made by Google executives hint that Motorola could also play a role in shaping the future of the Web in other areas—for instance, in set-top boxes. Motorola is by far Google's largest acquisition, and it takes the company into uncertain new territory. The deal is also likely to draw antitrust scrutiny because of the reach Google already has with Android, which runs on around half of all smart phones in the United States.  

"Motorola, which makes the Droid smart phone, went all-in with Google's Android platform in 2008, declaring that all of its devices would use the open-source mobile operating system.  

"Before his departure as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt had begun pressing Google employees to shift their attention to mobile. Cofounder and new CEO Larry Page seems determined to maintain this change of focus. In a conference call this morning, he told investors, 'It's no secret that Web usage is increasingly shifting to mobile devices, a trend I expect to continue. With mobility continuing to take center stage in the computing revolution, the combination with Motorola is an extremely important event in Google's continuing evolution that will drive a lot of improvements in our ability to deliver great user experiences.' " (http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38320/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-08-16, accessed 08-17-2011).

Sebastian Thrun, Research Professor Computer Science at Stanford and a leading roboticist, and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, Inc., in partnership with the Stanford University School of Engineering, offered a free online course entitled An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. 

According to an article by John Markoff in The New York Times, by August 15, 2011 more than 58,000 students from around the world registered for this free course— nearly four times Stanford's entire student body.

"The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a 'statement of accomplishment.'

"For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html?hpw, accessed 08-16-2011).

One fairly obvious reason why so many studients signed up is that Norvig is famous in the field as the co-author with Stuart Russell of the standard textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (first edition: 1995), which has been translated into many languages and has sold over 200,000 copies.

On January 17, 2012 Wikipedia went down and WordPress was dark to protest the potential passage of two bills under consideration by the U.S. Congress. The bills were known as the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.

According to the Official Google Blog:

"♦ PIPA & SOPA will censor the web. These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation. These bills would make it easier to sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Law-abiding payment processors and Internet advertising services can be subject to these private rights of action. SOPA and PIPA would also create harmful (and uncertain) technology mandates on U.S. Internet companies, as federal judges second-guess technological measures used by these companies to stop bad actors, and potentially impose inconsistent injunctions on them.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will not stop piracy. These bills wouldn’t get rid of pirate sites. Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities. There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding. As a result, Google supports alternative approaches like the OPEN Act" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dont-censor-web.html, accessed 01-19-2012)

Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, filed for its IPO stating that it had 845,000,000 users. Revenue in 2011 surged 88% to $3.71 billion. About 85% of that revenue came from advertising. Net income rose by nearly two-thirds to $1 billion.

According to the October 2012 IAB Internet advertising revenue report by the Internet Advertising Bureau, a New York based international organization founded in 1996:

"In the first half of the year, U.S. Internet sites collected $17 billion in ad revenue, a 14 percent increase over the same period of 2011. . . . In the second half of last year, websites had $16.8 billion in ad revenue. So even if growth were to slow in the second half, digital media this year could exceed the $35.8 billion that U.S. print magazines and newspapers garnered in ad revenue in 2011.

"In fact, the digital marketing research firm eMarketer projects 2012 Internet ad spending in excess of $37 billion, while print advertising spending is projected to fall to $34.3 billion.

"Meanwhile, television ad spending—which Nielsen reports was nearly $75 billion in 2011—continues to dwarf both" (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429638/online-advertising-poised-to-finally-surpass/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121017, accessed 10-22-2012).

"Today the data we have available to make predictions has grown almost unimaginably large: it represents 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, Mr. Silver tells us, enough zeros and ones to fill a billion books of 10 million pages each. Our ability to tease the signal from the noise has not grown nearly as fast. As a result, we have plenty of data but lack the ability to extract truth from it and to build models that accurately predict the future that data portends" ("Mining Truth From Data Babel. Nate Silver’s ‘Signal and the Noise’ Examines Predictions"  By Leonard Mlodinow, NYTimes.com 10-23-2012).

In a New York Times article published on October 29, 2012 Claire Cain Miller estimated that advertisers would spend $2.6 billion on ads on phones and tablets in 2012— less than 2 percent of the amount they would spend over all, but more than triple what they spent in 2010.

"Google earns 56 percent of all mobile ad dollars and 96 percent of mobile search ad dollars, according to eMarketer. The company said it is on track to earn $8 billion in the coming year from mobile sales, which includes ads as well as apps, music and movies it sells in its Google Play store. But the vast majority of that money comes from ads, it said."

"Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.  

"So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.  

"The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.  

"The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/technology/google-casts-a-big-shadow-on-smaller-web-sites.html?hpw, accessed 11-04-2012).

Xiao-Hui Bao and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 meters away, a demonstration seen as a significant milestone towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet.

"Quantum teleportation and quantum memory are two crucial elements for large-scale quantum networks. With the help of prior distributed entanglement as a “quantum channel,” quantum teleportation provides an intriguing means to faithfully transfer quantum states among distant locations without actual transmission of the physical carriers [Bennett CH, et al. (1993) Phys Rev Lett 70(13):1895–1899]. Quantum memory enables controlled storage and retrieval of fast-flying photonic quantum bits with stationary matter systems, which is essential to achieve the scalability required for large-scale quantum networks. Combining these two capabilities, here we realize quantum teleportation between two remote atomic-ensemble quantum memory nodes, each composed of ∼108 rubidium atoms and connected by a 150-m optical fiber. The spin wave state of one atomic ensemble is mapped to a propagating photon and subjected to Bell state measurements with another single photon that is entangled with the spin wave state of the other ensemble. Two-photon detection events herald the success of teleportation with an average fidelity of 88(7)%. Besides its fundamental interest as a teleportation between two remote macroscopic objects, our technique may be useful for quantum information transfer between different nodes in quantum networks and distributed quantum computing" (Xiao-Hui Bao Xiao-Fan Xuc, Che-Ming Lic, Zhen-Sheng Yuana, Chao-Yang Lua, and Jian-Wei Pana, "Quantum teleportation between remote atomic-ensemble quantum memories," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. America 10.1073/pnas.1207329109).

On November 20, 2012 the online educational technology company Coursera, founded in Mountain View, California, by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller of Stanford University in April 2012, had enrolled about 1,900,000 students from at least 196 countries in at least one course. At this time Coursera was partnering with 33 universities in the United States and around the world to distribute courses over the Internet.

"(Reuters) - Global hacking network Anonymous said it will shut down Syrian government websites around the world in response to a countrywide Internet blackout believed to be aimed at silencing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad.  

"Syria was plunged into communication darkness on Thursday [November 29] when Internet connectivity stopped at midday. Land lines and mobile phones networks were also seriously disrupted.  

"The Syrian government said 'terrorists' had attacked Internet lines but the opposition and human rights groups suspect it to be the work of the authorities.  

"Opposition activists have used the Internet extensively to further their cause by publishing footage of aerial strikes and graphic images of civilian casualties. In the absence of a free press, they have used social media to disseminate information during the uprising and communicate with journalists abroad.  

"Anonymous, a loose affiliation of hacking groups that opposes Internet censorship, said it will remove from the Internet all web assets belonging to Assad's government that are outside Syria, starting with embassies.  

"By 1000 GMT on Friday, the website for Syria's embassy in Belgium was down but the embassy in China - which Anonymous said it would target first - was operating. Most government ministry websites were down although this could be due to the blackout.  

"Several networking experts said that it was highly unlikely that the lines had been sabotaged by anti-Assad forces.  

"CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said on its blog that saboteurs would have had to simultaneously sever three undersea cables into the port city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country's Internet access.  

" 'That is unlikely to have happened,' CloudFlare said.  

" The government has been accused of cutting communications in previous assaults on rebel-held areas. Anonymous said Assad's government had physically 'pulled the plug out of the wall'.  

" 'As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator (Hosni) Mubarak did something similar - this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired,'it added, referring to an Internet outage during the early days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt.  

" French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said the communications cut was of a matter of 'extreme concern'.  

" 'It is another demonstration of what the Damascus regime is doing to hold its people hostage. We call on the Damascus regime to reestablish communications without delay,' he said.  

"Rebels have seized a series of army bases across Syria this month, exposing Assad's loss of control in northern and eastern regions and on Thursday fighting on the outskirts of the capital blocked access to the international airport.  

"More than 40,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March 2011, according to opposition groups.  

Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, said the Internet cut could signal that Assad is seeking to hide the truth of what is happening in the country from the outside world.  

"Syrian authorities have severely restricted non-state media from working in the country.  

"The hacker collective has staged cyber attacks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. Earlier this month, The Israeli government said it logged more than 44 million hacking attempts in just a few days during its military assault on Gaza after Anonymous waged a similar campaign" (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/us-syria-crisis-internet-idUSBRE8AT0PN20121130, accessed 11-30-2012).

♦ After two days of complete Internet blackout in Syria Cloudflare reported in its blog that Internet service partially resumed in Syria on December 1. Whether the service resumption was in response to political pressure from abroad, or threats from Anonymous, or caused by some other factor or factors was unclear.

According in the Information Policy & Access Center at the University of Maryland College Park, 100% of U.S. Public Libraries now offer public access to the Internet.

Once cell phone cameras with their very limited lenses and image processors became the most popular means of taking photographs, mainly because cell phone images could immediately be emailed, posted to websites, social media, etc., it was probably inevitable that camera companies would introduce regular more full-featured cameras incorporating computers that could be connected to the Internet through Internet "hot spots" or cellular connections. The first models offered at the end of 2012 were full-featured and overpriced, but the concept appeared to have great potential: 

"New models from Nikon and Samsung are obvious graduates of the 'if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em' school. The Nikon Coolpix S800C ($300) and Samsung’s Galaxy Camera ($500 from AT&T, $550 from Verizon) are fascinating hybrids. They merge elements of the cellphone and the camera into something entirely new and — if these flawed 1.0 versions are any indication — very promising.  

"From the back, you could mistake both of these cameras for Android phones. The big black multitouch screen is filled with app icons. Yes, app icons. These cameras can run Angry Birds, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pandora, Firefox, GPS navigation programs and so on. You download and run them exactly the same way. (That’s right, a GPS function. “What’s the address, honey? I’ll plug it into my camera.”) But the real reason you’d want an Android camera is wirelessness. Now you can take a real photo with a real camera — and post it or send it online instantly. You eliminate the whole 'get home and transfer it to the computer' step.  

"And as long as your camera can get online, why stop there? These cameras also do a fine job of handling Web surfing, e-mail, YouTube videos, Facebook feeds and other online tasks. Well, as fine a job as a phone could do, anyway.  

"You can even make Skype video calls, although you won’t be able to see your conversation partner; the lens has to be pointing toward you. Both cameras get online using Wi-Fi hot spots. The Samsung model can also get online over the cellular networks, just like a phone, so you can upload almost anywhere" (Pogue's Posts, NYTimes.com, 12-19-2012, accessed 12-21-2012).  

"Contemporary libraries have shifted from warehouses of books and materials to become participatory sites of culture and learning that invite, ignite and sustain conversations.

"The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:  

"· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;

"· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;  

"· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;  

"· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and  

"· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.  

"Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people first, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.

"Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.  

"While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people (Buffy J. Hamilton, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/27/do-we-still-need-libraries/its-not-just-story-time-and-bookmobiles, accessed 12-29-2012). 

"For what appears to be the first time ever, information technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks are paying more in dividends than companies in any other sector, S.&P. reported this week. Multimedia

"Off the Charts: High Tech, High Dividends S.&P. Dow Jones Indices reported that in 2012 the technology sector accounted for 14.7 percent of all dividends paid to investors in the 500 companies, up from 10.3 percent in 2011 and from a little over 5 percent back in 2004. It replaced the consumer staples sector, which had been the largest payer of dividends for the previous three years.  

"The change was largely because of the decision by Apple, now the most valuable company in the world, to begin paying dividends last year. The company had been public for more than three decades before it announced plans in March to begin making payouts. Four other technology companies in the index — all but one of which had been public for more than two decades without paying a dividend — later joined in making payments to shareholders.  

"With those changes, 60 percent — 42 — of the 70 technology stocks in the index are now dividend payers. The dividends from many technology companies are relatively small, however, and of the other sectors, only health care comes close to having as large a share of companies that do not pay dividends" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/business/information-technology-dividends-surge-past-consumer-staples-sector.html, accessed 01-12-2013).

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

"To mark the [twentieth] anniversary of the publication of the document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. To learn more about the project and the first website, visit http://first-website.web.cern.ch"

"This project aims to preserve some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. For a start we would like to restore the first URL - put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state. Beyond this we want to make http://info.cern.ch - the first web address - a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations."