| Internet history timeline |
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Early research and development:
- 1960–1962: J. C. R. Licklider networking ideas
- 1960–1964: RAND networking concepts developed
- 1962–1964: ARPA networking ideas
- 1965 (1965): NPL network concepts conceived
- 1966 (1966): Merit Network founded
- 1967 (1967): ARPANET planning begins
- 1967 (1967): Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
- 1969 (1969): NPL followed by the ARPANET carry their first packets
- 1970 (1970): Network Information Center (NIC)
- 1971 (1971): Tymnet switched-circuit network
- 1972 (1972): Merit Network's packet-switched network operational
- 1972 (1972): Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established
- 1973 (1973): CYCLADES network demonstrated
- 1973 (1973): PARC Universal Packet development begins
- 1974 (1974): Transmission Control Program specification published
- 1975 (1975): Telenet commercial packet-switched network
- 1976 (1976): X.25 protocol approved and deployed on public data networks
- 1978 (1978): Minitel introduced
- 1979 (1979): Internet Activities Board (IAB)
- 1980 (1980): USENET news using UUCP
- 1980 (1980): Ethernet standard introduced
- 1981 (1981): BITNET established
Merging the networks and creating the Internet:
- 1981 (1981): Computer Science Network (CSNET)
- 1982 (1982): TCP/IP protocol suite formalized
- 1982 (1982): Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
- 1983 (1983): Domain Name System (DNS)
- 1983 (1983): MILNET split off from ARPANET
- 1984 (1984): OSI Reference Model released
- 1985 (1985): First .COM domain name registered
- 1986 (1986): NSFNET with 56 kbit/s links
- 1986 (1986): Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
- 1987 (1987): UUNET founded
- 1988 (1988): NSFNET upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s (T1)
- 1988 (1988): Morris worm
- 1988 (1988): Complete Internet protocol suite
- 1989 (1989): Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
- 1989 (1989): PSINet founded, allows commercial traffic
- 1989 (1989): Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX East|FIXes)
- 1990 (1990): GOSIP (without TCP/IP)
- 1990 (1990): ARPANET decommissioned
- 1990 (1990): Advanced Network and Services (ANS)
- 1990 (1990): UUNET/Alternet allows commercial traffic
- 1990 (1990): Archie search engine
- 1991 (1991): Wide area information server (WAIS)
- 1991 (1991): Gopher
- 1991 (1991): Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX)
- 1991 (1991): ANS CO+RE allows commercial traffic
- 1991 (1991): World Wide Web (WWW)
- 1992 (1992): NSFNET upgraded to 45 Mbit/s (T3)
- 1992 (1992): Internet Society (ISOC) established
- 1993 (1993): Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
- 1993 (1993): InterNIC established
- 1993 (1993): AOL added USENET access
- 1993 (1993): Mosaic web browser released
- 1994 (1994): Full text web search engines
- 1994 (1994): North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) established
Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet:
- 1995 (1995): New Internet architecture with commercial ISPs connected at NAPs
- 1995 (1995): NSFNET decommissioned
- 1995 (1995): GOSIP updated to allow TCP/IP
- 1995 (1995): very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS)
- 1995 (1995): IPv6 proposed
- 1996 (1996): AOL changes pricing model from hourly to monthly
- 1998 (1998): Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
- 1999 (1999): IEEE 802.11b wireless networking
- 1999 (1999): Internet2/Abilene Network
- 1999 (1999): vBNS+ allows broader access
- 2000 (2000): Dot-com bubble bursts
- 2001 (2001): New top-level domain names activated
- 2001 (2001): Code Red I, Code Red II, and Nimda worms
- 2003 (2003): UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) phase I
Examples of Internet services:
- 1989 (1989): AOL dial-up service provider, email, instant messaging, and web browser
- 1990 (1990): IMDb Internet movie database
- 1994 (1994): Yahoo! web directory
- 1995 (1995): Amazon online retailer
- 1995 (1995): eBay online auction and shopping
- 1995 (1995): Craigslist classified advertisements
- 1995 (1995): AltaVista search engine
- 1996 (1996): Outlook (formerly Hotmail) free web-based e-mail
- 1996 (1996): RankDex search engine
- 1997 (1997): Google Search
- 1997 (1997): Babel Fish automatic translation
- 1998 (1998): Yahoo Groups (formerly Yahoo! Clubs)
- 1998 (1998): PayPal Internet payment system
- 1998 (1998): Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator
- 1999 (1999): 2ch Anonymous textboard
- 1999 (1999): i-mode mobile internet service
- 1999 (1999): Napster peer-to-peer file sharing
- 2000 (2000): Baidu search engine
- 2001 (2001): 2chan Anonymous imageboard
- 2001 (2001): BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing
- 2001 (2001): Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- 2003 (2003): LinkedIn business networking
- 2003 (2003): Myspace social networking site
- 2003 (2003): Skype Internet voice calls
- 2003 (2003): iTunes Store
- 2003 (2003): 4chan Anonymous imageboard
- 2003 (2003): The Pirate Bay, torrent file host
- 2004 (2004): Facebook social networking site
- 2004 (2004): Podcast media file series
- 2004 (2004): Flickr image hosting
- 2005 (2005): YouTube video sharing
- 2005 (2005): Reddit link voting
- 2005 (2005): Google Earth virtual globe
- 2006 (2006): Twitter microblogging
- 2007 (2007): WikiLeaks anonymous news and information leaks
- 2007 (2007): Google Street View
- 2007 (2007): Kindle, e-reader and virtual bookshop
- 2008 (2008): Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- 2008 (2008): Dropbox cloud-based file hosting
- 2008 (2008): Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all living species
- 2008 (2008): Spotify, a DRM-based music streaming service
- 2009 (2009): Bing search engine
- 2009 (2009): Google Docs, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service
- 2009 (2009): Kickstarter, a threshold pledge system
- 2009 (2009): Bitcoin, a digital currency
- 2010 (2010): Instagram, photo sharing and social networking
- 2011 (2011): Google+, social networking
- 2011 (2011): Snapchat, photo sharing
- 2012 (2012): Coursera, massive open online courses
- 2016 (2016): TikTok, video sharing and social networking
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Archie was a very early tool used to find files on the Internet. It helped people locate specific files stored in FTP archives. Many people consider Archie to be the very first search engine for the Internet.
Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, created Archie in 1990. Over time, newer and more advanced search tools replaced Archie. These included search engines like Jughead and Veronica, which worked with the Gopher system. Later, big search engines like Yahoo! (starting in 1995) and Google (starting in 1998) became popular.
Work on Archie stopped in the late 1990s. For many years, a special Archie server was kept running in Poland at the University of Warsaw for historical reasons. This server was active until 2023.
With help from the University of Warsaw, a new Archie server was launched on May 11, 2024. It is now available for everyone to use at The Serial Port, which is a website about old computers.
How Archie Began
Archie first started in 1986. At that time, Alan Emtage was managing the computer systems at the McGill University School of Computer Science. Before him, someone else had tried to get the university connected to the Internet. However, it was very expensive, costing about $35,000 each year for a slow connection to Boston. It was hard to convince people that this cost was worth it.
The name "Archie" comes from the word "archive," but without the 'v'. Alan Emtage has said that the name has nothing to do with the Archie Comics characters. Even so, other early Internet search tools like Jughead and Veronica were indeed named after characters from those comics. Also, Anarchie, an early program for downloading files, was named because it could use Archie to find things.
How Archie Worked
The first versions of Archie would look through lists of public FTP sites. These sites allowed anyone to download files. Archie used a method called Telnet to do this. It would then create special index files that users could access through FTP. To see what was inside a file, you had to download it first.
Archie updated its lists regularly, usually once a month for each site. This helped save computer resources on the remote servers. The lists were saved on local computers. Users could then search these lists using a special Unix command called grep.
The people who developed Archie filled its servers with databases of anonymous FTP directories. This allowed users to find specific file names. Archie could not understand regular questions or search inside the files themselves. So, users had to know the exact title of the file they wanted. Later, the Gopher system added the ability to search inside files.
Archie's Development
Alan Emtage and Bill Heelan created a way for people to log in and search the collected information. They used the Telnet system at a computer address called "archie.mcgill.ca". Over time, better ways to search and manage the system were created. Archie grew from a local tool to a popular service used across the entire Internet. Many different sites offered Archie searches.
The information collected by Archie servers was shared between them. You could access Archie in several ways:
- Using a special program on your computer, like archie or xarchie.
- Connecting directly to an Archie server using telnet.
- Sending your search questions by electronic mail.
- Later, through a World Wide Web interface.
When Archie was most popular, it accounted for half of all Internet traffic in Montreal.
In 1992, Alan Emtage, along with J. Peter Deutsch and some financial help from McGill University, started a company called Bunyip Information Systems. This company offered a commercial version of the Archie search engine. Millions of people around the world used it. Bill Heelan joined Bunyip soon after. There, he worked with Bibi Ali and Sandro Mazzucato to greatly improve the Archie database. They also started indexing web pages. Work on the search engine stopped in the late 1990s, and the company closed in 2003.
See also
- Alan Emtage
- Jughead
- Veronica
- Wide area information server
