Internet in the decade of the 1990s

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, ARPANET, discontinued operations and merges into the Internet in 1990.  The ARPANET network was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US.  It was developed by graduate students at the University of California – Los Angeles.  This merged into the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee writes The First Web Page November 13, 1990.  The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centered on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. This very first web page explained what the world wide web was and how to use it. 
During the Christmas holiday in December, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee writes the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:  Abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, it is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.  This is the beginning of the internet as we know it today.
A blog is a combination of web and log. It is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular comments or “posts.  Most of these blogs are interactive, and allow visitors to leave comments which is different than some websites.  In 1993, a Dr. Glen Barry invented blogging, with the "Forest Protection Blog" (originally entitled "Gaia's Forest Conservation Archives") at http://forests.org/blog/ was also the first political blog, as Dr. Barry campaigned there for forest protection and documented these efforts as his Ph.D. project.  The first blog initially used the gopher protocol, and has been on the web continuously since Jan. 1995, making it the web's first and longest continuously running blog.
The World Wide Web Wanderer, also referred to as just the Wanderer, was a Perl-based web crawler that was first deployed in June 1993 to measure the size of the World Wide Web.  (A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the web in a methodical, automated way or in an orderly fashion). This was later used to develop the first web-based search system.  This was developed by Matthew Gray, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who now works for Google. 
Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.  Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  they changed the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", which stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".  It is an American internet corporation founded in Santa Clara, California and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.  The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services. It is one of the largest websites in the United States.
The beginning of mainstream online shopping became infamous in July 1995 as both eBay and Amazon.com are founded.  Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995.  Originally called Cadabra, Inc., the name was changed when they found out people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver". The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is one of the largest rivers in the world.  The name “Amazon” suggests large size, and it also begins with an "A" so it shows up at the beginning of alphabetical lists.  eBay was founded in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose living room back in September 1995.  It was from the start meant to be a marketplace for the sale of goods and services for individuals.  In 1998, Pierre and his cofounder Jeff Skoll brought in Meg Whitman to help sustain the success of the organization. Meg had studied at the Harvard Business School and had learned the importance of branding at companies such as Hasbro.
Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) begins the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP on January 10, 1998.  A webcast is a media file distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand. Essentially, webcasting is “broadcasting” over the Internet.  This open the doors for the variety of webcasts that we have today.
Who hasn’t heard of Google?  Google has become a common house-hold name.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google, a large internet search engine.  The first Google index included 26,000,000 web pages.  It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests. They have a wide range of internet-based services and products.  They generate income mainly through advertising.  Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has led to a variety of products and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz.
One of the easiest ways to download music off the internet arrived in June of 1999 when Napster hit the internet.  Shawn Fanning releases the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files.  Members of Napster could upload music and then download music that others had shared and uploaded.  The music was digitally encoded as mp3 files.  There was no limit on the style or age of music that was uploaded to Napster.  As the file sharing became more widespread, eventually the company ran into copyright issues and had to cease operating.  Napster was eventually bought by Best Buy and Roxio.  Napster is now currently a pay service.

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