Some of the important years in the evolution of Internet are as follows:
1958: The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created following an initiative by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
1961: The principle of transmission of data in small portions or packets simplified the transfer of data within a computer network.
1965: The first wide-area computer network emerged. Lawrence G. Roberts and Thomas Merrill connected two computers located in Massachusetts and California with a telephone line. The email started as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate.
1969: APRA launched the ARPANET computer network. The physical network linked four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, University of Utah, SRI (in Stanford University) and University of California at Santa Barbara. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuit.
1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN created the standard internet e-mail format using the @ sign to separate user names and host names.
1972: Ray Tomlinson created the first email program. Network Control Protocol or NCP was being used by ARPANET to transfer data. NCP allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.
1973: Development began on a protocol named later TCP/IP. This new protocol allowed diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.
1974: The word Internet (abbreviation of internetworking) was used for the first time in a paper on Transmission Control Protocol.
1976: Ethernet which allowed the coaxial cable to move data extremely fast was developed. This was a crucial component to the development of Local Area Networks.
1981: The National Science Foundation released CSNET 56 to allow computers for networking without being connected to the government networks.
1983: TCP/IP, the basic communication language became the standard for internet protocol. The introduction of Domain Name System allowed domain names to automatically be assigned an IP number.
1991: The technology of hypertext documents, called the World Wide Web, was developed. The first computer viruses distributed through the internet materialised.
1993: The first internet browser and the first search engine were created. The first radio broadcasts made over the internet.
1994: The first online shops, virtual banks and advertising banners emerged. Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its web page.
1999: The first attempts to improve censorship on the internet were made by several countries. The MP3 format appeared. A wireless technology called 802.11b or Wi-Fi was standardized.
2001: Blackberry released first internet cell phone in the United States. P2P file sharing spread across the Internet.
2005: Estonia offered Internet Voting nationally for local elections. YouTube launched.
2010: 4G Wireless Networks were launched in the United States. US House of Representatives passed the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (H.R. 4061).
2011: 1.1 billion people with regular Web Access.
2012: Despite Asia only having an internet penetration of 21.5% made the largest percentage of worldwide internet users.