Photos: 23 milestones in the history of the web

​1989: The first commercial internet service providers

It didn't take long for commercial ISPs to spring up, despite not having much to connect to on the fledgling collection of servers that was the internet. Two such services claim to be the world's first ISP: DIALix, which claims to have been offering Australia-wide service in September 1989, and Boston-based The World reportedly brought its first customer online in November 1989.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1990: The first web browser

Primitive by any modern interpretation, the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. It only ran on a single machine (a NeXT computer), but luckily for those of us browsing the web in 2019 it was rebuilt to run inside a modern web browser.

Check it out here, and be sure to navigate to your favorite website (Document | Open From Full Document Reference | URL) to see how it looks without any of its modern features.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1991: The first website

Unsurprisingly, the first website was created at CERN and was a basic information page about the "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative" that would evolve into the modern internet.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1992: The first online image

The early years of the internet were text only, but that changed in 1992 when the first photo ever available on the internet was posted on a CERN website for employee activities.

That photo was of the CERN parody doo-wop band Les Horribles Cernettes, who are still performing today.

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Image: Les Horribles Cernettes

​1993: The internet becomes public domain

On April 30, 1993, CERN turned over all of its world wide web software to the public domain, making it possible for anyone to use all of the technology it had developed since 1989.

Without this decision, it's unlikely the internet would exist in the widely available, pervasive way it does today.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1993: The first search engine

Long before Google, way before Yahoo, and months ahead of ALIWEB, the first ever online search engine, W3 Catalog, went live.

It was a different kind of search engine that didn't rely on a web crawler, rather it mirrored pre-existing websites, broke them into individual entries, and allowed them to be searched.

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Image: Twitter

​1993: The first video on the web

The first video on the web wasn't actually a webcam focusing on a coffee pot--it was a live stream of the garage rock band Severe Tire Damage, who broadcast as a test of the experimental multicast backbone technology for carrying IP multicast traffic on the internet.

Severe Tire Damage later opened for the first-ever widespread IP multicast concert given by The Rolling Stones in 1994.

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Image: Severe Tire Damage

​1994: The first blog

Blogs: Who hasn't thought about starting a blog at some point? If you've been bitten by the blogging bug, you have journalist Justin Hall to thank for it: He was the internet's first blogger.

Justin started Links From Underground in 1994, mainly to blog about his life and share websites he thought were interesting. Hall is still blogging on www.links.net, where you can read his musings from today all the way back to 15 years ago.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1994: The first web hosting service

As Justin Hall pointed out on an early version of Links From Underground, his website was running on a Mac PowerBook from his Swarthmore College dorm room.

Those of us unable, or unwilling, to host a website on our personal computers in early 1994 just had to wait a few months for the mother of all early internet websites, and the first-ever web hosting service, to launch: GeoCities.

Now in its final days, GeoCities has fallen from the height of its purchase by Yahoo in 1999, when it was arguably the most popular web hosting service around. As TechRepublic sister site CNET points out, Yahoo Japan is pulling the plug on GeoCities (it's still available in Japan, though not in the US) on March 31, 2019, bringing an end to one of the most influential web services in the history of the internet.

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Image: CNET

​1994: First ecommerce site

If you attempt to navigate to Books.com today, you'll be redirected to Barnes & Noble, but in 1994, that URL would take you to the internet home of Book Stacks Unlimited, the first real ecommerce site.

Book Stacks Unlimited existed as early as 1992, selling books via dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS), but launched its website in 1994.

It's difficult to place the exact timing of the earliest ecommerce transactions, and if Books.com did beat Netmarket to the punch, it still lost out to NetMarket's win as the first encrypted ecommerce transaction.

Either way, 1994 was a banner year for online sales, with books and CDs (NetMarket's first sale was a Sting album) being available on the web years before Amazon was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos' eye.

Pictured: Book Stacks Unlimited founder Charles Stack

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Image: Flashstarts

​1994: The origin of the modern internet forum

Bulletin Board Systems, also called BBS, were around well before the birth of the modern internet, but they aren't exactly the same as modern internet forums, which came into being in 1994.

The World Wide Web Interactive Talk (WIT) forum software was born out of the need for easier internal collaboration (PDF) at the World Wide Web Consortium. It was the first software to resemble the modern internet forum, with its individuated forums, posts, and replies that function as discussion threads that we're all used to today.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1994: The first mobile browser

We take mobile browsing for granted in 2019, but in 1994 it was just getting started thanks to researchers at TecO, who developed the first mobile browser: PocketWeb.

PocketWeb was developed for the Apple Newton, and while both the Newton and PocketWeb have faded into obscurity, mobile internet browsing is a daily part of modern life.

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Image: TecO Research Group

​1994: The first online banner ad

On October 27, 1994, Wired's original website, Hotwired, launched with a bunch of advertisements that were an internet first: Banner ads.

It's impossible to determine which of the pool of banner ads Hotwired served up first, but AT&T's banner ad has become the one most commonly referred to as "the first banner ad."

It was plain, simply tempting users to click "right HERE." The ad made no mention of AT&T until a user clicked it, at which point it displayed an advertising page that linked to more information about AT&T, online tours of world art museums, and a feedback form.

It's a far cry from the ads of today, but one thing remains the same: It's built to entice you to click. Admit it--you wanted to.

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Image: Thefirstbannerad.com

​1996: The first instant messaging apps

Command line chat software and other methods of real-time messaging existed before 1996, but that was the year dedicated instant messaging software hit the internet in the form of ICQ.

ICQ was the first centralized chat app that a user could simply download, install, create an account, and start chatting on. Users of modern IM tools like Slack owe a lot to ICQ, which boasted more than 100 million users at its peak in 2001.

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Image: New York University

​1996: The first user-friendly webmail

It may not have been the first webmail platform, but Hotmail gets credit for being the first ready-to-use webmail service that didn't involve running Perl scripts on a UNIX machine to display email in a web browser.

Hotmail, which got its name from HTML, came to be in 1996, and email was never the same--it's hard to find someone who chooses to use a locally-installed mail client when web-based services like Gmail are so simple and feature rich.

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Image: CNET

​1997: The first social media site

Social media may have found its stride in the form of Myspace and Facebook, but it was around years before either of those two services in the form of SixDegrees.

SixDegrees was the first website to feature user profiles, friend lists, school affiliations, and other features familiar to social media users. It's still around, and new users still need a referral code from a current user to join--talk about exclusive.

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Image: CBS News

​1997: Wi-Fi is born

Wireless data transmission was nothing new in 1997, but what was new was the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard, which came into being when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers certified it, hence its IEEE 802.11 nomenclature.

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​1997: The first video sharing website

Eight years before the launch of YouTube, the internet saw the birth of the first video sharing website, Share Your World.

Share Your World ran from 1997 until 2001, when it shut down due to bandwidth problems and budget shortfalls. Share Your World may have simply been ahead of its time: YouTube launched in 2005 and changed online video history.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​1999: The rise of file sharing

Peer-to-peer file sharing exploded in popularity with the 1999 launch of Napster.

Anyone with an internet connection in 1999 likely remembers the early days of downloading music on a 56k connection, waiting around a quarter of an hour or more to get a single song.

Much of what we experience now in the modern music industry is thanks to Napster, which still exists today, though in name only: The Napster brand is what became of Rhapsody.

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Image: Reddit

​2000: Consumer broadband begins to appear

The turn of the millennium brought with it the widespread availability of consumer broadband in the form of asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSLs), which splits telephone lines into data and voice signals in order to reach speeds higher than those of a dial-up modem.

It's difficult to find information on when ADSL first rolled out in the US, aside from figures from the International Telecommunication Union that began tracking it in 2000.

The first consumer ADSL line run in the UK was March 2000, which may make Mark Bush of Gillingham, Kent, UK, the first person in the world to ever have an ADSL connection in his home.

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Image:CNET

​2001: The birth of the wiki

Imagine a world without Wikipedia, and you'll find yourself in the early days of 2001 prior to the January 15th launch of Wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia has given the world the largest online repository of information, as well as the publicly-editable wiki (Hawaiian for "quick") format, which has become pervasive around the world. Wikis exist in hundreds of languages and are as specialized as those for particular fandoms, software, hobbies, and even personal wikis for organizing one's life.

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Image: Brandon Vigliarolo/TechRepublic

​2002: The birth of the modern smartphone

There were many devices that could be called smartphones prior to 2002, but that was the year things truly changed, signaling a shift away from computers and toward mobile browsing for the masses.

This is a contentious claim to make, but the T-Mobile Sidekick, also known as the Danger Hiptop, was the device to lead that charge. Released in October 2002, the Sidekick preempted the flagship smartphone of the early 2000s, the BlackBerry Quark, by a few months and offered many of the same features, like an integrated phone, web browsing, and email capabilities.

Whichever device you choose to call the first modern smartphone, it's late 2002 or early 2003 that changed the internet in a big way.

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Image: CNET

​A future of firsts

At TechRepublic sister site CNET, Dan Ackerman said that the world wide web at 30 feels a lot like the early days, and while he may have been talking about the future of innovation I'm bringing it back a bit: There hasn't been a lot of truly revolutionary stuff on the internet since the early 2000s.

The smartphone changed the internet in perhaps the biggest way since the launch of GeoCities, but "firsts" have been largely absent since then. We have new social media platforms, faster Wi-Fi, better phones, and cloud computing, but let's be real--those are all just rehashes of older innovations.

Ackerman is hopeful for the future of the internet. I'm not so sure, but I do agree with him that a lot of the new internet feels like the same "boiler room salesmanship of pre-Dotcom Bust era."

One thing is for sure: We need some more internet firsts to push the world wide web out of its current funk.

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Also see

• The web at 30: How algorithms define what we experience and how we do business online (TechRepublic)
• Web programming languages: How WebAssembly will change the way you build web apps (TechRepublic)
• The Web turns 30: Dream or nightmare? (ZDNet)
• CERN's world-first browser reborn: Now you can browse like it's 1990 (ZDNet)
• Gallery: Say hello to the early days of web browsers (ZDNet)
• The World Wide Web at 30 feels a lot like the early days (CNET)
• Tim Berners-Lee still believes the web can be fixed, even today (CNET)
• More must-read Tech History coverage (TechRepublic on Flipboard)

Image: Urupong, Getty Images/iStockphoto