Table 1. Timeline: Evolution of the Internet (1, 27)
1836 Telegraph patented.
1866 First Transatlantic cable operational.
1876 Telephone exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell.
1945 Vannevar Bush writes an article about a device called a Memex which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche.
1957 USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite: the start of global telecommunications.
1958  In response to Sputnik, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is created by the US Department of Defense (DoD).
1960s Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext browsing and editing. He invents the mouse for this purpose.
1965 Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in the publication Literary Machines.
1969 The beginning of the Internet: ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking.
1971 People first communicate over a network. 15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET. E-mail invented.
1972 First public demonstration of  ARPANET, connecting 40 machines.
1976 Queen Elizabeth sends out an e-mail.
1980 Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made betwen arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links.
1982 The word "Internet" (short for interconnected networks) is coined. Invention of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), making it possible to exchange information between many of different subnetworks.
1990 Tim Berners-Lee starts work on a global hypertext system, GUI browser / editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program.
1991 First (text only) web browser available. First Web server installed outside of Europe.
1992 26 HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) servers operational worldwide. The term "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.
1993 The year it all changed. January: about 50 HTTP servers and about 600 WWW sites on line; WWW traffic measures 0.1% of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) backbone traffic. April 30: Declaration that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees. September: Working versions of Mosaic browser for X, PC/Windows and Macintosh.
1994 10,000 WWW sites. Over 1500 registered servers. Load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) 1000 times what it had been 3 years earlier.
1995 100,000 WWW Sites. The Web is a main theme of the G7 meeting hosted by the European Commission. New WWW technologies emerge: JAVA, Javascript, ActiveX, VRML, Search engines. WWW traffic now dominates NSF backbone traffic.
1996 Over 500,000 WWW Sites. Microsoft enters. Internet phones arrive.
1997 Over 1,300,000 WWW Sites. Streaming media available.
1998 Over 3,300,000 WWW Sites. Web size estimated at about 300,000,000 pages. E-Commerce, E-Auctions, Portals; E-trading begins.
1999 Over 9,500,000 WWW Sites.  E-Trade, Online Banking, MP3 popular.
2000 Over 22,000,000 WWW Sites. Estimated 6 billion people on line. Wireless technologies maturing.
2001 Over 575,000,000 WWW sites by January, estimated 1.4 billion pages. Broadband high speed access enters mainstream