A short history of the net and web

1940-45 - Claude Elwood Shannon lays the theoretical foundations for digital circuits and information theory.*
1960-65 - Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England and Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation independently invent packet-switching.
 1957 - USSR launched the first Sputnik satellite in to orbit around the earth. In response the USA Department of Defence formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
1961 - Leonard Kleinrock publishes his theories on small packet-switching, the underlying theoretical foundations for a distributed, digital network.
1962 - J.C.R. Licklider of MIT writes a series of memos in August discussing his "Galactic Network" concept.
1965 - Paul Baran writes a paper on "Distributed Communications on Networks".
1965 - ARPA funds a fact finding paper on "Network of time-sharing computers".
1967 - ARPA Principal Investigators semi-annual meeting at the University of Michigan, where networking features heavily on the agenda.
1968 - After Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ (Request For Comment, a polite way of building technical specifications and protocols, inviting debate and participatory design) was released by DARPA. The contract to formulate and build Network hardware and programmes was won by BBN.
1969 - University of California Los Angeles went live, connecting to Doug Engelbart's group at SRI in Menlo Park, California. the first life pulses through the ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. Doug doesn’t even remember exactly when it was, it was seen as pretty routine at the time, a new piece of networking equipment, new capabilities, exciting, but not more so than the rest of the work they were doing.
 1972 - The Inter Networking Working Group was formed to help establishing protocols.
1974 - Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish a paper outlining TCP (Transmission Control Program) allowing for an Internet; a network of networks.
1989 - Tim Berners-Lee releases HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) protocols which will become the World Wide Web. Hypertext on connected computers for the masses.
1990 - ARPANET name ceases to exist.
1990 - The first Web browser is developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland.
1993 - Mosaic, the revolutionary graphical web browser appears, written by Marc Andresen, later to become Netscape and copied - and taken over, by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The original browser, developed by Tim Berners-Lee, allowed the end user to create and edit web pages. Marc Andreessen's browser allowed for easier access and navigation, but no creation. This was a major shift.
1993 - Hypermedia encyclopaedias sell more copies than print encyclopaedias.
1995 - Netscape gains market value of almost $3B on first day of stock.
1998 - AOL buys Netscape for $4B.
1999 - There are 3.6 million sites. (David Lake at The Standard)
2000 - The .com bubble burst and reality sets in.
2005 - Bubble 2.0