RFC 2235               Hobbes' Internet Timeline           November 1997


1991
     Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. formed by
     General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc.
     (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet), after NSF lifts
     restrictions on the commercial use of the Net (:glg:)

     Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle,
     released by Thinking Machines Corporation

     Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ
     of Minnessota

     World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer
     (:pb1:)

     PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman (:ad1:)

     US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National
     Research and Education Network (NREN)

     NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

     NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion
     packets/month

     Defense Data Network NIC contract awarded by DISA to Government
     Systems Inc. who takes over from SRI in May

     Start of JANET IP Service (JIPS) which signalled the changeover
     from Coloured Book software to TCP/IP within the UK academic
     network. IP was initially 'tunnelled' within X.25. (:gst:)

     CERT advisories: 23

     Countries connecting to NSFNET: Croatia (HR), Czech Repulic (CZ),
     Hong Kong (HK), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Singapore
     (SG), South Africa (ZA), Taiwan (TW), Tunisia (TN)

1992
     Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered

     Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000

     First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November)

     RIPE Network Coordination Center (NCC) created in April to provide
     address registration and coordination services to the European
     Internet community (:dk1:)




 
RFC 2235               Hobbes' Internet Timeline           November 1997


     IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes
     part of the Internet Society

     Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada

     World Bank comes on-line

     Japan's first ISP, Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), is formed by
     Koichi Suzuki

     The term "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly
     (:jap:)

     Internet Hunt started by Rick Gates

     CERT advisories: 21, reports: 800

     Countries connecting to NSFNET: Antarctica (AQ), Cameroon (CM),
     Cyprus (CY), Ecuador (EC), Estonia (EE), Kuwait (KW), Latvia (LV),
     Luxembourg (LU), Malaysia (MY), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI),
     Thailand (TH), Venezuela (VE)

1993
     InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services:
     (:sc1:)
        - directory and database services (AT&T)
        - registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)
        - information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)

     US White House comes on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/):
        - President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov
        - Vice-President Al Gore: vice-president@whitehouse.gov

     Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4),