THE GUARDIAN'S HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

The internet at sort-of-40. How did we get here?

We're looking to compile a history of the internet, by the internet. Want to help?

* Simon Jeffery


Man holding up laptop displaying smiley face

Man holding up laptop displaying smiley face Photograph: Microzoa/Getty Images

The internet is sort-of-40 this year. Not in the sense of a Hollywood actor who is in reality much older but prefers to act vague, however. In the sense that if you set the October 1969 networking of US research universities through Arpanet as the start point then it is a significant birthday.

To mark this, we want to tell the internet's story. This is not the first time this has been done and will not be the last, but we want to tell the story of the internet using the internet – that is, the people who use it.

Below there is a list of 30 events from the past 40 years – encompassing the technological development of the internet and some of the impact it has had on culture, business, politics and society. Some of that makes for entertaining reading – reaction to the first piece of spam (a US army major gets involved) or the 1982 conversation that led to the first use of the :-) emoticon.

But these 30 events are not the only ones that mattered. There is no YouTube on here, nothing of Barack Obama's use of the web for fundraising – and that is intentional. We'd like to know what you think is significant.

At the bottom of this page is a form where we would like you to nominate events memorable to you, be they ones we may already know about or something more personal such as the first websites you used or emails you sent. Our list is, for example, light on social media moments or internet dating. Or the thrill of a first Geocities site.

Maybe you did some of this pioneering work in the early days of the internet and want to talk about it. Whatever your experiences, we'd like to hear from you.

Where will it end? Well, this is a work in progress. But we will publish updates to the list and this autumn hope to produce an impressive told-by-the people version of the internet story

And here is the list of 30 ...
1969 Arpanet starts Computers at two academic departments in California are linked by Arpanet, the predecessor of the internet
1971 @ Ray Tomlinson devises electronic mail for arpanet. He settles on @ to separate the name of the user from the name of their computer
1971 Project Gutenberg Michael Hart begins a project to make copyright-free works electronically available. The first text is the US Declaration of Independence, now archived as gutenberg.org/etext/1
1971 Expansion The network is now connecting 23 hosts
1973 ARPAWOCKY Early network humour: Twas brillig, and the Protocols / Did USER-SERVER in the wabe./ All mimsey was the FTP, / And the RJE outgrabe
1973 To Europe Norway is connected to Arpanet via Norsar, a US-Norwegian network to relay information on earthquakes and nuclear explosions. From Norway, a connection goes to University College London
1974 TCP/IP Vint Cerf and others publish a proposal to link up Arpa-like networks. It has no central control and is built around a protocol (TCP/IP) for the exchange of data
1976 Royal email Queen Elizabeth sends her first email on a visit to the MoD’s scientific research hub
1978 Spam Gary Thuerk sends what is now considered the first unsolicited commercial email. Major Raymond Czahor of the US defence communications agency assures Arpanet users it will not happen again
1978 Bulletin boards The first bulletin board is developed during a particularly bad blizzard in Chicago. Ward Christensen's creation allows computer users with a modem to talk to each other and exchange software and data
1982 :-) Scott Fahlman proposes the use of :-) after a joke, beating off rivals including %, * and {#} - said to be 'like two lips with teeth showing between them'
1983 Internet begins? 1 January is the cut-off point for computers to use Cerf's transmission control protocol (TCP). Cerf estimates this involved between 200-400 hosts
1984 Lots more connections The number of hosts breaks 1,000, Japan establishes Junet, the UK begins Janet (the joint academic network) and the Soviet Union connects to Usenet.
1984 The Well It calls itself 'the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born'. A Guardian profile of The Well's co-founder Stewart Brand said it was 'where most of the discoveries of cyberspace were first made'
1985 .com The domain name that for many defines the web is created. The oldest .com registration still in existence belongs to Virginia-based Symbolics
1989 Start of the web Tim Berners-Lee proposes to his bosses at Cern a document retrieval system to run on the internet. His mechanism will use hypertext to make a file in one location appear as if it is in a window on another
1990 Archie Considered the first internet search engine, Archie is created by Canadian university student Alan Emtage. It allows users to match queries against file names (not the content of those files, that was still to come)
1990 Internet toaster A toaster becomes the first remotely-operated machine connected to the internet. A single control - power on or power off - is used to control grilling. It still requires a human to insert the bread
1991 First web page published The web goes public. Its first page explains it is a 'wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative'
1991 Webcam coffee A coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab is the inspiration for the world's first webcam. It allows people in other parts of the building to avoid pointless trips when it is empty
1992 L0pht The Boston-based hacker collective is founded
1994 Yahoo! Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web is launched. In time it is renamed Yahoo!
1995 Amazon.com The internet bookseller goes online. By the final quarter of 2001 it turns a profit - a little behind its plan for profitability within four to five years, but is still considered an exceptional dotcom performer
1996 Proto-Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford, begin work on BackRub, a search engine that ranks websites according to the number of links to them. It is incorporated as Google in 1998
1999 'Celestial jukebox' Shaun Fanning's Napster application launches. It allows users share music files on each others' computers
1999 MI6 names leaked The uncontrollable nature of the internet is brought to attention when the names of more than 100 MI6 agents are leaked to a US website. Despite being taken down, the names spread across other sites
2001 Wikipedia It proclaims itself a collaborative encyclopedia. Eight years after launch it is now the most popular reference work online
2001 SETI@Home A project to harness the distributed processing power of the internet gathers enough volunteers within four weeks to surpass the most powerful supercomputer of its time
2004 The war on spam Bill Gates tells the World Economic Forum at Davos that spam will be erradicated within two years. It isn't
2005 First spam conviction Jeremy Jaynes sentenced to nine years in prison and his sister, Jessica DeGroot, fined $7,500
2006 Twitter The 140 character service launches. Many who initially try it think it pointless. By 2009 it is credited with transmitting news of Iranian protests to the outside world

You may notice the launch of Twitter is the final item on this list. That is not to suggest that it is the final perfection of the internet (just to be clear).