Chapter 3 - Part 5

Timeline of The Internet and The Web

• 1990's: Birth of the Web
  

• 1991 NSFNet lifts commercial ban on using Internet.  Gopher, developed at the Uinv. of Minnesota, is first truely user-friendly interface to the Internet.  Had menu system to access files (only text) on networks.  Tim Berner-Lee creates HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which use specifications for URLs or Uniform Resource Locators, for web addresses. 
  

• 1993 Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina create Mosaic first web browser.  (Mosiac evolved into Netscape (commercial), and a variant has evolved into Mozilla, and Firefox) With Mosaic, the Internet experiences a 341,634% annual growth rate of (HTML-based) service traffic !  Gopher has a 997% growth rate.
  

• 1994  Yahoo!, which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is founded by two PhD students from Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo.
  

• 1998 Microsoft starts browser wars with release of Internet Explorer as a bundled component of Windows 98.