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August 6, 1991, at CERN in Switzerland, built by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and gave it away. On April 30, 1993 CERN placed the web software in the public domain, which is the reason anyone can build on it today. The whole story is on our History of the Internet page.

The first documented European visit was Jean Nicolet in 1634, though the exact spot he came ashore is still argued about. The French called the place La Baye, or La Baye Verte, the green bay, and the English version of the name stuck. Continuous settlement traces to Charles de Langlade, who had a trading post here by the 1740s and moved up for good around 1764.

The first United States military post at Green Bay, built in 1816 by army troops under Colonel Talbot Chambers on the west bank at the mouth of the Fox River, and named for General Benjamin Howard. Zachary Taylor served there years before he became president. The army left in 1852, and two original buildings, the 1834 hospital and the 1835 kitchen, still stand at Heritage Hill State Historical Park.

From the Jesuits. Father Claude Allouez built the St. Francis Xavier mission at the rapids of the Fox River in 1671, and the spot became known as Rapides des Peres, the rapids of the fathers. Shorten that in everyday speech for three centuries and you get De Pere. The state historical marker still stands in Voyageur Park.

Charles Michel de Langlade, born at Michilimackinac in 1729 to a French fur trader and an Ottawa chief’s sister. He and his father had a trading post at Green Bay by about 1745, and he moved here permanently around 1764. The Wisconsin Historical Society credits that settlement as his claim to the title. He died in 1801.

October 26, 1818, by Michigan Territory Governor Lewis Cass, and named for General Jacob Brown, a hero of the War of 1812. Crawford County was declared the same day, which makes Brown one of the first two counties in what would become Wisconsin. Green Bay took the county seat from De Pere by popular vote in 1854.

Little Sturgeon sits in the Town of Gardner in Door County and counted 177 residents in the 2020 census. In the 1800s F.B. Gardner ran a sawmill, grist mill, shipyard and two lime kilns there, shipping lime to Chicago after the fire of 1871. The town still carries his name. We work from Green Bay and from Little Sturgeon, which is why both names sit at the top of this page.

Wisconsin papermaking started in Milwaukee in 1848 and moved north to the Fox River Valley for the water power, the rail and water transportation, and the timber. Wood pulp technology around 1870 sealed it. By the 1940s paper was the third largest industry in the state, and the valley still runs on specialty paper today.

The word was “lo.” On October 29, 1969 a UCLA programmer started typing “login” to a computer at Stanford Research Institute over ARPANET. The system crashed after two letters, so the first thing ever sent across the internet’s ancestor was an accident.

Thirteen NFL championships, more than any other franchise, including four Super Bowls. The Packers were founded on August 11, 1919 by Curly Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, and they are the only publicly owned nonprofit team in major American pro sports. Roughly 5.2 million shares are held by about 539,000 stockholders, and not one of them collects a dividend.

The rapids at De Pere. In 1673 Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet left from there to look for the Mississippi River, following the Fox and Wisconsin route that everyone in this country used before there were roads. The state marker at Voyageur Park records the departure.

The British name for the old French fort at the mouth of the Fox. Lieutenant James Gorrell arrived October 12, 1761 with seventeen soldiers, took over the rotting post and renamed it for King George III’s younger brother. It was the only Great Lakes post not attacked during Pontiac’s Uprising, and Gorrell evacuated it in 1763. The British never came back.

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter in Milwaukee on June 23, 1868 and sold the rights to Remington in 1873, which is how the world got the QWERTY keyboard. He came to Wisconsin in 1837 and got his start in the newspaper trade right here, co-founding the Green Bay Wisconsin Democrat with his brothers. Every keyboard on earth traces back to a Wisconsin printer.

The name traces to a Native word for the Wisconsin River, written down by Jacques Marquette in 1673 as Meskousing and most likely meaning “it lies red,” for the red sandstone of the Dells. The French spelled it Ouisconsin. The badger nickname has nothing to do with the animal being common: it comes from 1800s lead miners in the southwest who dug into hillsides and sometimes lived in the tunnels. Wisconsin became the 30th state on May 29, 1848.

Two rival plats on the same river. The Astor tract was surveyed in 1835 and named for John Jacob Astor, whose American Fur Company men had the money in it. Just upriver sat Navarino, the plat of Daniel Whitney. The two merged in 1838 into the Borough of Green Bay, and the Astor street grid is essentially unchanged from the 1835 survey.

Madison. Professor Earle M. Terry and his students at the University of Wisconsin built a wireless telephone transmitter in Science Hall, sent voice and music in 1917, and began scheduled broadcasting in 1919 as experimental station 9XM. The WHA call letters replaced 9XM on January 13, 1922, which makes it the longest running station in the nation.

It does. Larry Landweber, a computer science professor at UW Madison, proposed CSNET in 1979 and the National Science Foundation funded it in 1981. By 1984 it linked more than 180 computer science departments and carried internet access well past the original defense network. He is in the Internet Hall of Fame.

Right here. The Green Bay Intelligencer began publishing in December 1833 at Navarino, now part of Green Bay, founded by John V. Suydam with Albert Gallatin Ellis as its first editor. The Wisconsin Historical Society calls it the first newspaper west of Lake Michigan. Local publishing in this town is one hundred and ninety odd years old, and we are still at it.

The only road there was. The Fox and Wisconsin rivers gave the best canoe route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, which is exactly why the French put a fort at the mouth of the Fox in 1717 and why the Americans put Fort Howard there in 1816. Not until the military road connecting forts Howard, Winnebago and Crawford was finished in 1837 did Green Bay have an overland link to the rest of Wisconsin.

Because the glaciers left it that way. The Fox runs roughly 200 miles from south central Wisconsin north and northeast into the bay of Green Bay, which makes it the largest tributary feeding Lake Michigan through the bay. Most American rivers run south, which is why this one catches people off guard.

The Menominee and the Ho-Chunk, long before any European reached it. The Menominee origin account places them in this region from the beginning, and the Ho-Chunk identify Red Banks on the bay as their place of origin. Both nations are here today, and we are proud to build and maintain websites for tribal nations across Wisconsin.

De Pere. WHBY signed on April 5, 1925 from St. Norbert College, and the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association calls it northern Wisconsin’s first commercial radio station. A college station on the Fox River put this corner of the state on the air a full century ago.

More than people expect. The typewriter was developed in Milwaukee by C. Latham Sholes, whose 1873 QWERTY layout is still on the keyboard you are reading this with. Appleton’s Vulcan Street Plant started up on September 30, 1882 as the first Edison hydroelectric central station in North America. And Seymour Cray, the father of the supercomputer, was born in Chippewa Falls and built Cray Research there.

A kid from Chippewa Falls. Seymour Cray, born September 28, 1925, founded Cray Research in 1972 and shipped the Cray-1 in 1976, a machine that ran 240 million calculations per second and defined what a supercomputer was for a generation. Wisconsin has been in the computing business a lot longer than most people assume.

La Baye was the French name for Green Bay (Baie des Puants) and the settlement on it. Jean Nicolet made the first documented European visit in 1634, French fur traders and Jesuits followed, and in 1717 the French built a fort at the mouth of the Fox River to protect the fur route after the first Fox War. La Baye was a working town with a couple hundred people by the 1750s, which is why we named our blog (LaBayeBlog.com) after it for the love of this Northeastern Wisconsin area we grew up in and have raised our family in. We also love history as you will find browsing around our website.

1854. That same year a popular vote moved the Brown County seat from De Pere to Green Bay. The west side across the river stayed separate for another four decades as Fort Howard, named for the old army post, and was annexed into Green Bay in 1895. That is why the west side still feels like its own town to anyone who grew up here.

Because for a while there actually were. The Village of De Pere incorporated in 1857, West De Pere followed in 1870, and in 1883 the legislature made them two separate cities, the west one briefly called Nicolet before it was renamed West De Pere in 1887. They merged back into one City of De Pere around 1890. The east side and west side labels never went away.

Mill Center is an unincorporated community in the Town of Pittsfield in Brown County, out where County Road C meets Glendale Avenue, with part of it reaching into the Village of Howard. Downtown Green Bay is about eleven miles to the southeast. It is the kind of Wisconsin place that barely registers on a map app and absolutely still has a name.

Eleven federally recognized tribal nations call Wisconsin home, and a twelfth, the Brothertown Indian Nation, resides here without federal recognition. Fox Valley Web Design works with many of Wisconsin’s tribal nations and offers every one of our services to any Native American tribe.

Charles Haskins put Milwaukee’s first switchboard in service on May 10, 1879. The first operators were telegraph messenger boys, swapped out for women after customers complained about them. The Wisconsin Telephone Company incorporated July 7, 1882 with sixteen exchanges and 600 Milwaukee customers, and the first long distance call to New York City went through in 1892.

Les Paul, born Lester William Polsfuss in Waukesha on June 9, 1915. He bolted a guitar neck to a four by four piece of wood, called it The Log, and proved a solid body would sing without feeding back. Gibson launched the Les Paul model in 1952. He also pioneered overdubbing and multi track recording, which is most of modern record making.

Appleton, on September 30, 1882. The Vulcan Street Plant on the Fox River was the first Edison hydroelectric central station in North America to serve private and commercial customers, about 12.5 kilowatts running two paper mills and the home of H. J. Rogers. It came on line just twenty six days after Edison’s steam plant on Pearl Street in New York.