This is the last day

This is the last day of the Internet/Web history stuff. I promise.

However, I have saved the best for last. Keith Lynch’s timeline of net related terms, concepts, stories, and people is basically a list of items culled from over 25 years of mail and Usenet postings (2 gigabytes worth!), organized by the date each item was first used. Notable terms/dates include:

- Microsoft (Mar 81)
- Internet (Feb 82)
- Smileys such as :-) (Nov 82)
- Chain letters via e-mail (quickly stamped out until 1993) (Aug 85)
- Year 2000 problem (Jan 88)
- FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) (Sep 89)
- “Web” (as in World-Wide) (Mar 92)
- “home page” (Oct 92)
- Linux (an operating system) (Nov 92)
- aol.com gets access to newsgroups (Mar 93)
- The $5 -> $50,000 chain letter in newsgroups (Jun 93) No chain letters since 1985….until AOL users can access the newsgroups. Heh.
- “spam” (meaning mass sending of netnews) (Apr 94)
- MP3 (May 95)
- “blog” (short for weblog) (Nov 99)

Keith has also posted a spam-related timeline of terms and a more personal history of the net, both worth looking at.