The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History

[Sombeech]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137824/article.html

From a blog about a stained blue dress to the day Larry met Sergey, these are the pivotal moments that made the Web what it is today.

16. Scandal in a Blue Dress - January 17, 1998; 11:32 pm PST: Drudge breaks the Lewinsky scandal.

Love Matt Drudge, hate him, or think as little about him as possible, you have to give the muckraker (or is that pitchforker?) his due. One day after Newsweek killed a story about a new scandal in the Clinton White House, The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky story anyway. It was the first notable example of the Web scooping the national media, but it wouldn't be the last.

As when the telegraph supplanted the pony express, traditional media sources realized they could not compete with the immediacy of the Net and began scooping themselves, publishing stories first on the Web and later in print. Some publications killed their print editions to publish exclusively online; others redefined themselves or disappeared entirely. The Web news era had begun.

15. Do You Yahoo?

February 1994: Jerry and David bookmark the Web.
Jerry Yang, co-creator of Yahoo.

Some hobbies take on a life of their own; others change the world. In early 1994, Stanford PhD students Jerry Yang and David Filo posted a list of their favorite sites on the Web. The exact date they posted the links is lost to history, but we do know the list's original name: "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." By April '94 it had a new tongue-in-cheek name: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," or Yahoo for short.

Yahoo represented the first attempt to catalog the Web, offering directory-style listings of every site that mattered--with tiny sunglasses marking sites deemed truly cool. When providing exhaustive coverage became impossible, Yahoo was reborn as a Web portal, combining the directory with search, news headlines, instant messaging, e-mail, photo hosting, job listings, and assorted other services. As other major portals like Lycos and Excite died off or were consumed by bigger fish, Yahoo continued to expand. Though surpassed by the Google search juggernaut, Yahoo may have memorable Web moments yet to come with cofounder Jerry Yang holding the reigns.

14. Blogging Katrina - August 28, 2005; 12:01 p.m. CST: The Survival of New Orleans Blog debuts.

13: Bidding for Stardom - September 3, 1995: eBay completes its first auction. According to eBay lore, the first item auctioned was a broken laser pointer that sold for $14.83, proving that someone somewhere will buy just about anything.

12. Something Wiki This Way Comes - January 15, 2001: Wikipedia posts its first entry. Think of Wikipedia as an endless series of arguments, filled with edit wars and revisions to revisions, archived and identified by contributor. The result is a sprawling, anarchic, constantly changing resource that serves as many people's first stop when researching something on the Web (though, given the controversy over the accuracy of many entries, we hope it's not their last).

Creator Jimmy Wales doesn't remember the first Wikipedia entry, though he does remember the first words he typed into the wiki software: "Hello world."

11. Candid Camera - April 1996: JenniCam goes live.

10. You and 3,255,620 of Your Closest Friends - March 2003: Friendster makes the connections.

9. Act Globally, Think Locally - October 24, 1995: Craig Newmark unveils his list.

Like many seminal Web events, Craigslist started out as a quirky side project seemingly devoid of commercial possibilities. In March 1995, Craig Newmark quit his job as a software architect for Charles Schwab in San Francisco and started a mailing list where subscribers could share information about interesting cultural events in the Bay Area.

8. Odd Pioneers - February 16, 2003: Web mail service Oddpost debuts

7. URL Be Glad They Did - June 23, 1983: The domain name system is born.

Thank Paul Mockapetris, Craig Partridge, and the late Jon Postel for the fact that you didn't have to type 70.42.185.10 to get here. Together they created the domain naming system, replacing numerical Internet addresses with English-language "domains" and introducing the nongeek world to joys of the backslash key.

6. Geeks Bearing Gifts - March 15, 1993; 1:11 a.m. CST: The graphical browser is born.

5. For Whom the Bell Tolled - July 16, 1995: Amazon.com opens for business.

4. LO! and Behold - October 29, 1969; 10:30 p.m. PST: The first packets make their way across the Net--barely.

Late on the evening of October 29, Professor Len Kleinrock linked a mainframe computer at UCLA to one at the Stanford Research Institute over a dedicated phone line. To test the connection, Kleinrock had arranged for students at UCLA to transmit the word "LOG," after which the computer at SRI would respond with "IN." Researcher Charley Kline managed to send the L and the O, but before he could send the G, the system crashed.

3. When Sergey Met Larry - September 7, 1998: Google incorporates.

2. Day One of Irrational Exuberance - August 9, 1995; 9:30 a.m. EST: Netscape goes public.

1. World Wide Wonder - December 25, 1990: The Web comes online.

On Christmas morning 1990, Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva communicated with the world's first Web server--presenting all of us with a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

[double moo]

Al Gore... Did we forget somebody???

[Sombeech]

Al Gore... Did we forget somebody???

He was #17. "Funniest claim about the internets"