1971 – Bolt Beranek and Ray Tomlinson invent email by adapting an internal messaging
program and extending it to use the ARPANET to send messages between sites.
Within a year, three quarters of ARPANET traffic is email.

1976 – The Queen sends an email from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in
Malvern.

1982 – Scott Fahlman kick-starts smiley-culture by suggesting using the 🙂 and 🙁
smileys to convey emotions in emails.

1986 – Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams, Center for Seismic Studies,
releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using
internet-standard TCP/IP connections.

1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invent the World Wide Web to make
information easier to publish and access on the internet.

1994– Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web is renamed Yahoo! and receives 100,000 visitors. In 1995,
it begins displaying adverts.

1995 – eBay is launched to enable internet users
to trade with each other.

1996 – Broadband is introduced to the UK with the aim of replacing the slower dial
up technology.  The phenomenon                really took off and by 2011 71%
of UK homes had broadband internet.  The
Sky Broadband sign-up rate alone stands at
77 new customers an hour, every hour since 2006.

1998– Google arrives. It pioneers a ranking
system that uses links to assess a website’s popularity.

2000 – The dotcom bust. After several years of venture capitalists throwing money at
proposals with ‘internet’ on the cover, many businesses fail to find a market .

2003 – Nearly half of us are connected: UK telecomms regulator Oftel reports that
47% of UK homes have internet access and 58% have a PC.

2004 – As broadband becomes more popular, media companies start selling music and
video online. Napster relaunches as a paid music download store, competing with
Apple iTunes.

2004 – Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook at Harvard University, and photo sharing
website Flickr is born, coinciding with the rise in digital photography.

2005 – The internet starts to threaten television and telephone companies. Youtube
launches to enable people to easily publish videos online.

2006 – Twitter is created. In stark contrast to the proliferation of lengthy blog
posts online, Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters.

2009 – Actor Ashton Kutcher becomes the first person on Twitter to have a million
followers subscribing to his ‘tweets’.

2010 – In February, Facebook announced it has 400 million active members. That’s
larger than the population of the US and UK combined.

Courtesy of Sean McManus at www.sean.co.uk