Making Sense of the Internet Timeline

        For our discussion of Internet history, and the future of the "Darknet," its "evil twin," try to figure out how important events in the 'net's history maps onto your own life.  Note that while you may start to answer the questions using information only from the Timeline, you will have to do additional research to create a full answer.  Some questions also are complex, multi-layered, such as the first one.  Even some of the seemingly simple questions (e.g., the second one) have more to teach you about how the Internet and your phones and (other) computers work to produce text.

• What was the original "backbone" of the 'net constructed to serve when it was "ARPANET," and what did that acronym stand for?  How did the Internet change from an American institution to an international one? 

• In what year was the first email sent? 

• In what year did the first destructive program intentionally crash a significant portion of the 'net?  Extra credit: who created it? 

• In what year was the "WorldWideWeb" introduced (i.e., what the "www" stands for)? 

• In what year did the first commercial retailers set up virtual "shops" on the Web?

• What were the most important events happening on the Internet in the year you were born? 

• Notice when Robert Zakon's timeline for Internet growth ceases--2017 (as of 8/31/2023).  That was when the whole enterprise became too complex to map with a single "timeline."*  How would you begin to continue that maping process with online innovations that have happened in the year since then while you were active users of the 'net?  Comparison with Mark Hilbert's timeline of the rise of new types of digital information might yield some insights about the relationship between the Internet as a system and digital information as a form of "text."

•       One massive Internet-related event is deliberately not included in Robert Zakon's Timeline because it was not specifically a technological phenomenon, but rather a financial one: the bursting of "the Dot-Com Bubble" in the world's stock markets between March 2000 and October 2002.*  Internet-related companies had become wildly popular investments even when they generated no profits (money left over after paying the bills), sometimes when they had no revenue (money coming in at all), and even when they had no actual working product to sell.  People frantically chased "initial public [stock] offerings" (IPOs), bidding up stock prices within days or hours by hundreds or thousands of percent.  Rapidly inflating stock prices meant that insiders who were paid in stock options became "paper billionaires," sometimes within days of the companies' IPOs.  Corporate fraud was not uncommon in such an environment.  Between March and April 2000, a series of events warned investors to sell, but fewer and fewer were buying so stock prices fell quickly.  The lucky ones already had sold their own dot-com shares as soon as the six-month "lock-up" period after the IPO was over, and put their profits in solid investments.  The unlucky ones rode the crash all the way down to poverty.  Even companies whose businesses were unrelated to the Internet or technology saw their stock prices dragged down with the dot-coms. Those who resisted selling every investment they owned at the bottom of the crash recovered the value of their other investments, but it took between five and ten years.  (Note: when we study hand-press printed text, you will encounter a similar "shake-out" that occurs in the second half of the fifteenth century when perfectly competent printers went out of business because there were too many of them, and too many printed books, for too few readers.  In time, reader numbers caught up with printing capacity and the growth continued again.)

* Robert Zakon, personal email, 12 December 2023.