1993: The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new Internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network. QRZ.com goes online on October 23. 1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95. 1994: Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The company was later incorporated in March 1995. 1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide Internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the Internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed. 1995: The first online dating site, Match.com, launches. 1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heats up. CNET buys tv.com for $15,000. 1996: A 3D animation dubbed "The Dancing Baby" becomes one of the first viral videos. 1997: Netflix is founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a company that sends users DVDs by mail. 1997: PC makers can remove or hide Microsoft’s Internet software on new versions of Windows 95, thanks to a settlement with the Justice Department. Netscape announces that its browser will be free. 1998: The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the Internet. 1998: The Internet Protocol version 6 introduced, to allow for future growth of Internet Addresses. The current most widely used protocol is version 4. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses allowing for 4.3 billion unique addresses; IPv6, with 128-bit addresses, will allow 3.4 x 1038 unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. 1999: AOL buys Netscape. Peer-to-peer file sharing becomes a reality as Napster arrives on the Internet, much to the displeasure of the music industry. 2000: The dot-com bubble bursts. Web sites such as Yahoo! and eBay are hit by a large-scale denial of service attack, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet. AOL merges with Time Warner 2001: A federal judge shuts down Napster, ruling that it must find a way to stop users from sharing copyrighted material before it can go back online. 2003: The SQL Slammer worm spread worldwide in just 10 minutes. Myspace, Skype and the Safari Web browser debut. 2003: The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched. 2004: Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser. 2005: YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded. 2006: AOL changes its business model, offering most services for free and relying on advertising to generate revenue. The Internet Governance Forum meets for the first time. 2006: Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr." 2009: The Internet marks its 40th anniversary. 2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users. 2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched. 2013: Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. 2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year. 2016: Google unveils Google Assistant, a voice-activated personal assistant program, marking the entry of the Internet giant into the "smart" computerized assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft. 2018: Both Apple and Amazon reach $1T in value. QRZ turns 25 years old!
It's been a wild ride. I used to be convinced it was all adding up to great progress, but now I'm not so sure if that.
Congratulations Fred! Happy Silver Anniversary by SV1LHZ Jim. (the only one proud QRZ.com Life member from GREECE)
