1983 – Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel run the first successful test of the distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This automated process was to take over failing Arpanet and CSnet protocols because those relied on address books.
DNS uses a hierarchical distributed naming system for the Internet or any private network. It associates the domain names with numerical IP addresses.
2001 – To compete with AOL, Internet Service Providers NetZero and Juno Online Services announce they will merge to become United Online. The company would eventually acquire other assets to keep afloat, including the purchase of the FTD group in 2008.
Of course, NetZero had changed their business model to a Wireless plan in 2012 and operates a broadband and dial up service nation-wide.
2006 – Swedish police raid the host of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent. On the same day, the Pirate Bay political party increased their numbers by 500, with an additional 930 joining the following day.
The site stayed down for 3 days, but came back to double the traffic due to the media coverage.
1999 – Believeinkids.com became the five-millionth domain name in the world. At the time, a domain name cost $70 for the first year, $35 a year thereafter.
The domain name was abandoned and is still available to this day.
2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created a Fork of B2/cafelog. From there, WordPress was born. Since its release, WordPress has taken over Content Management Systems (CMS) with its ease of use and plethora of programmers that have made plugins, themes and other tweaks to the system since. The current version is 3.5.1 which has been downloaded over 18 million times.
1973 – Robert Metcalfe writes a thirteen-page memo describing a new type of data transmission method. His memo was entitled “Ether Acquisition”, which would connect Hawaii’s ALOHA Network.
Alto Ethernet was born on paper, but didn’t see operation until November 11, 1973 when it was implemented.
Metcalfe was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1996 for his work on inventing Ethernet. He was also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.
2013 – In a $1.1 billion deal, Yahoo acquired the blogging site Tumblr. This caused many concerns for those using the service – especially those who curate blogs with pornographic content. However, Yahoo insisted they will be running Tumblr as a separate company and will not interrupt any account unless it breaks laws (such as child pornography).
Yahoo did de-list a lot of those blogs in their search a couple months later to give others a clean-search experience.
In 2017, Verizon bought Yahoo, and all remaining assets thereof. Tumblr is an “Oath Subsidiary”, meaning it works independent to Verizon. In March, 2019, Tumblr removed any adult content, trying to boost their SEO, and advertising options.
2001 – TAT-14, the Transatlantic cable begins commercial service. A dual, bi-directional ring configuration using Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplex (DWDM) – Sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. It carried 640 Gbps, and connectedGermany, the UK, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands with the US.
Even though there have been a couple failures, TAT-14 is still in service.