From ARPANET To AI • The Story Of The Web
The History Of The Internet
From a two letter message that crashed a computer in 1969 to the AI assistants answering questions today: the complete story of the internet, web design and the people who built it, told by a Wisconsin web design family that has been shipping websites since 1997.
A Resource From Fox Valley Web Design • Est. 1997
How The Internet Actually Happened
The internet was not invented by one person on one day. It was built in layers over seven decades: Cold War research networks, a physicist's side project in Switzerland, a browser written by college students, and wave after wave of engineers, designers and dreamers. This page is the whole story, kept current through the AI era.
1969the year the first ARPANET message traveled from UCLA to Stanford
1991the year the first public website went live at CERN
2022the year ChatGPT launched and the AI web began
It Started With A Satellite
In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and a rattled United States answered in 1958 by creating ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA funded wild ideas, and one of the wildest came from J.C.R. Licklider, who imagined in 1962 a galactic network of computers sharing information. Researchers Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock worked out packet switching, the idea of chopping data into small packets that find their own way across a network. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock's UCLA team sent the first ARPANET message to Stanford. They typed LOGIN. The system crashed after LO. The internet's first word was, fittingly, hello cut short.
A Physicist Gives The World The Web
The internet moved data between machines for twenty years before it became something ordinary people could use. In March 1989, a British engineer at the CERN physics lab named Tim Berners-Lee proposed an information management system his boss labeled vague but exciting. By 1990 he had invented HTML, HTTP, the URL, the first browser and the first server. On August 6, 1991 the first public website went live, and Berners-Lee gave it all away for free. Every website ever built, including this one, descends from that decision.
Why A Web Design Company Keeps A History Page
Because we lived a good chunk of it. Fox Valley Web Design opened in 1997, back when websites were built with table layouts and dial up patience. We shipped sites through the dot-com boom and bust, adopted WordPress when it was young, rebuilt everything responsive when the iPhone changed the rules, and now build for the AI era. Understanding where the web came from is how we make good bets about where it is going, and those bets are what our clients pay for. If you would rather look forward than back, our website design page covers how we build today.
Seven Decades In One Scroll
The Complete Internet Timeline
Every milestone that mattered, from vacuum tubes to AI agents. Dates verified against primary sources, because a history page should get its history right.
The Foundations • 1950s To 1970s
A satellite scare, a research agency, and the crazy idea that computers should talk to each other.
1957The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, shocking the United States into a technology race.
1958ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, is founded to fund frontier research.
1962J.C.R. Licklider describes his galactic network vision of connected computers.
1964Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock develop packet switching, the internet's core idea.
1969October 29: the first ARPANET message travels from UCLA to Stanford and crashes after two letters. By December, four universities are connected.
1971Ray Tomlinson invents network email at BBN and chooses the @ symbol to separate user from machine.
1973Bob Metcalfe invents Ethernet at Xerox PARC, the technology that still wires offices today.
1974Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish the TCP paper describing how separate networks can speak one language.
The Protocol Era • 1980s
The internet gets its common language and its address book.
1983January 1, the famous flag day: ARPANET switches to TCP/IP. This is the birthday of the modern internet.
1983Paul Mockapetris creates the Domain Name System, replacing numeric addresses with names humans can remember.
1985Symbolics.com becomes the first registered .com domain on March 15. The commercial internet has an address.
1989March: Tim Berners-Lee submits his World Wide Web proposal at CERN. His supervisor writes vague but exciting on the cover.
The Web Is Born • 1990 To 1998
HTML, browsers, JavaScript, PHP and a search engine from a garage.
1990Berners-Lee invents HTML, HTTP, the URL, the first browser and the first web server on a NeXT computer.
1991August 6: the first public website goes live at info.cern.ch, explaining what the web is.
1993NCSA Mosaic, built by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, gives the web images and a friendly face.
1994Netscape is founded; Håkon Wium Lie proposes CSS; the W3C forms to guard web standards.
1995A landmark year: Brendan Eich creates JavaScript in about ten days, Rasmus Lerdorf releases PHP, Internet Explorer ships, Netscape goes public, and Amazon and eBay open their doors.
1996CSS1 becomes a standard. Design finally separates from structure.
1998September 4: Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google. Searching the web stops being a chore.
Boom, Bust And The Rise Of The CMS • 1995 To 2006
Fortunes made and lost, browser wars fought, and the tools that still power the web today.
2000March 10: the NASDAQ peaks at 5,048 and the dot-com bubble bursts. Roughly 8,000 internet companies disappear over the next two years.
2001Dries Buytaert releases Drupal 1.0 in January. Open source content management gathers steam.
2003May 27: Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little release WordPress as a fork of the b2 blogging tool. It will grow to power over 40% of the web.
2004Facebook launches from a dorm room, Gmail debuts, and Firefox 1.0 reignites the browser wars against Internet Explorer.
2005YouTube uploads its first video and Joomla 1.0 ships. The read only web becomes the read write web.
2006Twitter launches, John Resig releases jQuery, Amazon opens AWS, and a Canadian snowboard shop's software becomes Shopify.
The Mobile Revolution • 2007 To 2015
One phone announcement rewrites every rule of web design.
2007Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone. The full web in a pocket changes what every website must be.
2008Google releases Chrome, which becomes the world's dominant browser within four years.
2010Ethan Marcotte coins responsive web design in A List Apart. One flexible site for every screen replaces separate mobile sites.
2011September 27: WooCommerce launches and WordPress becomes a serious store platform.
2013Facebook releases React and the modern JavaScript application era begins.
2014HTML5 becomes an official W3C standard, and mobile internet use passes desktop for the first time.
2015Google's Mobilegeddon update makes mobile friendly design a ranking requirement, not a suggestion.
The Modern Web • 2016 To 2021
Speed, security and standards take center stage.
2017HTTPS becomes the norm as browsers begin flagging plain HTTP pages as not secure.
2020Adobe Flash reaches end of life on December 31, closing the plugin era. Google announces Core Web Vitals in May, turning real user speed into a measurable standard.
2021Google rolls Core Web Vitals into rankings with the page experience update. Fast wins.
The AI Revolution • 2022 To 2026
The biggest shift since the browser, and it is still accelerating.
2022November 30: OpenAI launches ChatGPT. It reaches 100 million users in two months, the fastest growing consumer app in history.
2023GPT-4 arrives in March, Anthropic's Claude reaches the public, and Google answers with Bard, later renamed Gemini.
2024May 14: Google launches AI Overviews in US search results. AI answers begin replacing lists of links.
2025AI agents move from demos to daily work, writing code, running research and operating software.
2026The AI era matures: roughly 68% of US Google searches end without a click, AEO and GEO become standard practice, and Divi 5's ground up rebuild brings the AI age to WordPress design. The story continues, and this page will keep telling it.
Sources for the dates on this page include the Internet Society, CERN, the W3C, university archives and first party company announcements. Spot an error? Tell us and we will fix it, because that is how the web was built in the first place.
The Battles That Shaped Your Browser
The Browser Wars And The Evolution Of Web Design
The software you are reading this in exists because companies fought viciously over it, twice. And the way this page looks exists because web design reinvented itself roughly once a decade. Here is the short version of both stories.
Browser War I: Netscape Versus Microsoft (1995 to 2001)
Netscape Navigator owned the early web, at its peak carrying the overwhelming majority of traffic. Then Bill Gates turned Microsoft around with his famous Internet Tidal Wave memo, bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows, and the fight was on. Features shipped weekly, standards were trampled, and developers built pages that worked in one browser or the other, rarely both. Microsoft won the battle, IE passed 90% share, and the victory triggered the landmark antitrust case that reshaped the industry.
Browser War II: The Standards Strike Back (2004 to Today)
Out of Netscape's ashes came the open source Mozilla project, and in 2004 Firefox 1.0 gave the world a faster, safer, standards respecting browser. Then Google entered in 2008 with Chrome, built for speed and updated silently every few weeks. Chrome now dominates worldwide, Safari rules Apple devices, and the lasting prize of the second war went to everyone: browsers that finally agree on standards, which is why one well built website can work everywhere.
How Web Design Grew Up
Design eras, in order: the gray page and blue link era of the early 90s; the table layout and spacer GIF era of the late 90s, when designers bent HTML tables into layout tools; the Flash era of the 2000s, gorgeous and doomed; the CSS standards era that separated style from structure; the responsive era after 2010, when one flexible design replaced separate mobile sites; the flat, fast, component driven era of the 2010s; and today's era of design systems, Core Web Vitals, accessibility law and AI assisted building. Each era solved the last one's biggest problem. We have built websites in every one of them since 1997.
The pattern worth noticing: open standards beat closed platforms every single time, eventually. Tables lost to CSS, Flash lost to HTML5, and locked in builders keep losing to open source WordPress. It is the closest thing web history has to a law of physics, and it is why we bet our clients' websites on open platforms.
Give Credit Where It Is Due
The Pioneers Worth Knowing
The internet has no single inventor. It has a roster. These twelve people, among many others, built the world you are browsing right now.
The Builders Of The Internet And The Web
Networks, protocols and the web itself.
Tim Berners-LeeCERN · 1989
Invented the World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP and the URL at CERN, then gave it all away royalty free so anyone could build on it. Later founded the W3C to keep the web open.
Best known for: Inventing the Web and refusing to own it.
Vint CerfTCP/IP · 1974
Co-designed TCP/IP with Bob Kahn, the protocol suite that lets every network on earth speak one language. Widely called a father of the internet.
Best known for: Co-writing the internet's common language.
Bob KahnTCP/IP · 1974
The other half of the TCP/IP partnership and an architect of ARPANET's network technology. His open architecture ideas made connecting different networks possible.
Best known for: The internet's open architecture.
Leonard KleinrockUCLA · 1969
Developed the mathematical theory behind packet switching, and his UCLA lab sent the first ARPANET message in October 1969.
Best known for: Hosting the internet's first hello.
Ray TomlinsonEmail · 1971
Invented email between networked machines and picked the @ symbol that now appears in every address on earth.
Best known for: Email and the @ sign.
Håkon Wium LieCSS · 1994
Proposed Cascading Style Sheets while working with Berners-Lee at CERN, giving web design its own language.
Best known for: Making the web beautiful, properly.
The Builders Of The Modern Web
Browsers, languages, platforms and the devices in your pocket.
Marc AndreessenMosaic · Netscape
Co-created the Mosaic browser as a student, then co-founded Netscape, whose 1995 IPO fired the starting gun on the dot-com era.
Best known for: Giving the web a friendly face.
Bill GatesMicrosoft
Built Microsoft into the platform most of the world used to reach the early web, and his 1995 Internet Tidal Wave memo pivoted the company into the browser wars.
Best known for: Putting the web on every desktop.
Steve JobsApple · iPhone
Co-founded Apple and unveiled the iPhone in 2007, the device that forced the entire web to become mobile first.
Best known for: Putting the web in every pocket.
Brendan EichJavaScript · 1995
Created JavaScript at Netscape in roughly ten days. It is now the most widely used programming language on the planet.
Best known for: The language every browser speaks.
Rasmus LerdorfPHP · 1995
Released PHP, the server language that went on to power WordPress, Wikipedia and an enormous share of the dynamic web.
Best known for: The engine under WordPress.
Matt MullenwegWordPress · 2003
Co-created WordPress with Mike Little in 2003 and has stewarded it into the platform behind over 40% of all websites, ours included.
Best known for: Democratizing publishing.
Every one of these stories has a deeper rabbit hole, and the links above are the entrance. History pages should send you somewhere interesting.
From ARPANET To AI, Answered
50 Internet History Questions People Actually Ask
No single person did. The internet grew from ARPANET, built by teams funded by ARPA, with packet switching theory from Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies, and the TCP/IP protocols from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. It was a relay race, not a solo sprint.
The first ARPANET message was sent October 29, 1969. The modern internet running on TCP/IP dates to January 1, 1983, the flag day cutover. Both dates are fair answers depending on your definition.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, the US funded research network that pioneered packet switching. It connected UCLA and Stanford in 1969, grew to four universities by that December, and evolved into the internet.
LO. The UCLA team was typing LOGIN to the Stanford computer on October 29, 1969, and the system crashed after two letters. They completed the login about an hour later.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer at the CERN physics lab in Switzerland. He proposed it in March 1989 and built HTML, HTTP, the URL, the first browser and first server by the end of 1990.
The internet is the global network of connected computers, born from ARPANET. The web is one service running on top of it: linked pages viewed in a browser, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989 to 1991. Email and video calls use the internet but are not the web.
August 6, 1991, at info.cern.ch. It described the World Wide Web project itself, and a restored copy is still online today.
Ray Tomlinson in 1971, at the research firm BBN. He also chose the @ symbol to separate the user's name from their machine, a decision the entire world still types daily.
WorldWideWeb, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and later renamed Nexus. The first browser most people actually saw was NCSA Mosaic in 1993, which added inline images and easy installation.
A graphical browser built by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois in 1993. It made the web visual and simple, growing it from a physics tool into a public phenomenon, and its team went on to found Netscape.
Two industry battles for browser dominance: Netscape versus Microsoft's Internet Explorer from 1995 to 2001, which Microsoft won by bundling IE with Windows, and the second war from 2004 onward among Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge, which Chrome leads today.
Microsoft's free bundled Internet Explorer crushed its market share in the late 1990s. Netscape open sourced its code, which became Mozilla and eventually Firefox, then was acquired by AOL. Its DNA lives on in every modern browser.
A late 1990s investment frenzy in internet companies. The NASDAQ peaked at 5,048 on March 10, 2000, then fell roughly 78% over two years as thousands of unprofitable dot-coms failed. Survivors like Amazon, eBay and Google defined the next era.
September 4, 1998, by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its PageRank algorithm, which ranked pages by who linked to them, made search dramatically better overnight.
HyperText Markup Language, the structural language of every web page, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. HTML5, the current major version, became an official standard in October 2014.
Cascading Style Sheets, the language controlling how web pages look. Håkon Wium Lie proposed it in 1994, CSS1 became a standard in 1996, and modern CSS handles layouts that once required hacks and images.
Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995, famously in about ten days. Despite the rushed birth, JavaScript became the most used programming language in the world and the only one every browser runs natively.
A server side programming language released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. It powers WordPress, Wikipedia and a huge share of the dynamic web, including the websites we build and host.
The web design hacks of the late 1990s. Before CSS matured, designers built page layouts inside invisible HTML tables and used transparent single pixel images to force spacing. Clever, fragile and thankfully extinct.
Adobe Flash was a browser plugin that powered the animated, interactive web of the 2000s. It was closed, insecure and battery hungry, Apple banned it from the iPhone in 2010, open standards caught up, and Adobe ended it on December 31, 2020.
May 27, 2003, released by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of the b2/cafelog blogging tool. It grew from a blogging platform into the CMS behind roughly 43% of all websites.
Open source freedom, an enormous plugin and theme ecosystem, a friendly editor, and a worldwide developer community. Competitors were either harder to use, easier to outgrow, or locked you in. WordPress was none of those.
The mid 2000s shift from read only pages to participatory platforms: blogs, wikis, social networks, video sharing and user reviews. The web stopped being a library and became a conversation.
Facebook in February 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. Together they moved everyday life onto the web and made social presence part of every business plan.
Everything about its shape. After 2007, real browsing happened on phones, which forced responsive design, touch friendly interfaces, mobile first thinking and eventually Google's mobile ranking requirements.
Designing one flexible website that adapts to every screen size. Ethan Marcotte coined the term in a 2010 A List Apart article, and within five years it became the industry standard and a Google ranking factor.
The nickname for Google's April 2015 update that began favoring mobile friendly websites in mobile search results. Sites that ignored phones started losing visibility, and mobile first design became mandatory.
Around 2014 globally, with the gap widening every year since. Today well over half of all web traffic and more than 70% of online shopping sessions happen on phones.
The encrypted version of the web's transfer protocol, shown by the browser padlock. It became effectively mandatory in the late 2010s as Google rewarded it in rankings and browsers began labeling plain HTTP sites not secure.
Renting computing power over the internet instead of owning servers, popularized when Amazon opened AWS in 2006. It is why startups stopped buying server rooms and why websites can scale overnight.
Secure online purchases began in 1994 to 1995, with Amazon and eBay both launching in 1995. PayPal made paying strangers safe, and platforms like WooCommerce, launched in 2011, put real stores in small business hands.
The open source plugin that turns WordPress into an online store, launched September 27, 2011, and later acquired by Automattic. It powers millions of shops, including the ones we build for Wisconsin businesses.
A 2006 JavaScript library by John Resig that smoothed over browser differences with simple syntax. For a decade it was on most of the web, and it paved the way for modern frameworks like React, released by Facebook in 2013.
Google's real world speed and stability metrics, announced in 2020 and added to rankings in 2021: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). They made measurable performance part of web design history.
The credential that enables HTTPS encryption between a visitor and a website, powering the browser padlock. Required today for payments, forms, trust and rankings. Every site we launch includes one.
November 30, 2022. It reached 100 million users in about two months, the fastest consumer product adoption ever recorded, and it kicked off the AI era of the internet.
Leading AI assistants from Anthropic and Google, both public since 2023. Alongside ChatGPT they are changing how people search, work and build software, including how websites get designed and written.
AI generated answers that appear at the top of Google results, launched to US users on May 14, 2024. They summarize sources directly on the results page, which is reshaping how websites earn visibility.
A search that ends without the user clicking any website, because the answer appeared right on the results page. By 2026 roughly 68% of US Google searches end this way, which is why being cited in answers matters as much as ranking.
Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization: the modern practice of structuring a website so AI assistants and answer engines cite it. The newest chapter of search history, and one we practice daily.
AI assistants now draft code, content and imagery, developers ship faster, and AI chatbots serve customers around the clock. Strategy, taste and accountability remain human. It is the biggest workflow shift since the iPhone.
Early tools like Archie (1990) indexed file archives, and web search engines like WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista arrived in 1994 to 1995. Google, founded in 1998, outranked them all with link based results.
The World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to steward open web standards like HTML, CSS and accessibility guidelines. It is a big reason one website can work in every browser.
Designing sites usable by people with disabilities, guided by the W3C's WCAG standards. In the US, updated ADA rules now require public entities to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, with deadlines in April 2027 and 2028 depending on size.
Domain names arrived with DNS in 1983, and symbolics.com became the first registered .com on March 15, 1985. Today hundreds of millions of domains are registered across countless extensions.
Yes. CERN restored the 1991 site at its original address, info.cern.ch, and browsing it is a two minute history lesson worth taking.
Bill Gates' May 1995 internal memo declaring the internet the most important development since the PC and turning Microsoft's full weight toward it. It set up the browser wars and defined a decade of computing.
More than two thirds of humanity is online, well over five billion people, up from a few thousand researchers in the 1970s. It is the fastest adopted technology in human history.
Because the pattern repeats: open standards beat closed platforms, speed and simplicity win, and every platform shift rewards businesses that adapt early. Knowing the history is how you recognize the next shift while competitors are still arguing about the last one.
The family team at Fox Valley Web Design in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We have designed, built and hosted websites since 1997, and we keep this page updated as the story unfolds. When you are ready to build your chapter, request a quote or call 920-434-9772.
The Web Has A History. Your Website Is Its Future and included in the STORY.
Seventy years of invention led to this moment: customers searching, asking AI assistants, and judging businesses by their websites in the blink of an eye.
We have been building for the web since 1997, through every era on this page. Let that experience build your next website.
Contact Fox Valley Web Design and put 27 years of web history to work for your business.