I thought you all might enjoy this. And no. . . . Al Gore didn't create the internet!

1945: Wabbevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, envisions a system of interconnected information access.

1958: Eisenhower administration established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik.

1962: J.C.R. Licklider comes to ARPA and subsequently creates the IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office). Licklider was interested in the development of an "Intergalactic Network" of interconnected computers.

1965: Robert Taylor, as director of the IPTO suggests that his office build an interconnected network for ARPA.

1967: ARPA agrees to pursue the development of an ARPA network.

1969: ARPANet is launched. The first four nodes exist at UCLA; Stanford; University of California, Santa Barbra; and the University of Utah at Salt Lake City.

1969: RFC 1 is issued. RFCs (Request for Comments) eventually become the de facto nethod for addressing any Internet-related issue.

1971: Ray Tomlinson develops the first e-mail application for ARPANet. His applications are called SNDMSG and READMAIL. He was also responsible for putting the @ symbol in e-mail addresses.

1973: ARPANet makes its 1st international connection adding the University College of London and the Morwegian Royal Radar Establishment to its growing list of nodes.

1974: Vint Cerf invents the TCP/IP transmission standard. Formally adopted as an Internet standard in 1982, TCP/IP remains the prominent transmission protocol on the internet.

1980: Tim Berners-Lee, and English scientist at CERN, creates a program that makes it possible to forge internal connections between files on a network.The program is called Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything. Or just plain ENQUIRE.

1986: The National Science Foundation (NSF) establishes NSFNET. This backbone which initally has a maximum throughput of 56Kbps, serves as the primary transmission channel for educational institutions, government offices, military bases, and research labs. In 1995, the NSF hands control of the Internet to commercial enterprises.

1989: MCI Mail and Compuserve launch the first commercial Internet e-mail service.

1990: Tim Berbers-Lee creates the World Wide Web, launching it at CERN headquarters in Switzerland.

1992: A total of 50 Web servers constitute the World Wide Web.

1993: America Online opens its private e-mail service to the Internet. Until this point, AOL's e-mail service was restricted to communication among AOL subscribers only.

1993: Marc Andreessen, Undergrad of Illonois at Urbana Champaign, leads a team of computer scientists and students in developing the Mosaic Web browser to support graphics.

1994: Yahoo! is born. David Filo and Jerry Yang, grad students at Stanford, start the directory service as a way of tracking the growing number of sites on the Web.

1996: Microsoft, accepting the fact that the internet is here to stay, releases Internet Explorer.This starts the "browser war" between Microsoft and Netscape.

1998: With internet popularity and Web usage soaring, several companies launch Web portals.

1999: Online shopping finally hits the big time. Many retailers can't keep up with demand.

2000: The dreaded Y2K bug, which some feared (or hoped) would devestate society, has absolutely no effect on milennium revelry.

2002: Intra-board squabbles disrupt ICANN as the Internet's governing authority for IP addresses debates a motion to restructure itself.

Hope you all enjoyed that little bit of history. Most of the information was taken from "How the Internet works" Refrence Series. . . printed by Smart Computing magazine. It is an excelent source for all kinds of information. Sorry for any English mistakes. . . . but I don't have time to correct them right now.