Digging through the history

[dracodraconis]

Arpanet - Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
It was formed back on 1968 (when I was born), although it had been proposed as early as 1962.
http://www2.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa-Introduc.html - History of ARPNet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET - wikipedia entry about Arpanet. (Historical note: Queen Elizabeth sent her first email in 1976)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet - wiki's Internet history
http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/arpanet.html - IP was first adopted in 1983
http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/internet_history/
Arpanet was shut down in 1990.

Email
By 1971 the standard form of the email address was defined, although "email" existed as far back as 1965.

BITNet - Because It's Time Net
Formed in 1981, it originally consisted of only two universities, Yale and CUNY. It peaked in 1991, but it faded with the growing popularity of the Internet in the early 1990s.
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aaso.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitnet
http://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_bitnet.htm

NetNorth and CA*Net
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cn/netnorth.html - Canada's equivalent of NSFNet was NetNorth, formed in 1983 and consisted of two universities, Guelph and Waterloo, connected at 2400-baud. In 1984 they joined the US university BITNet (Because Its Time Network), then adopted the IP standard in 1989. By 1991, the CA*Net backbone was formed. NetNorth ended after 1992.

NSFNet - National Science Foundation Network
The first wide area network was formed in 1984 with the the first Internet backbone established in 1986. This was the year I graduated from high school and started university. About this time the term "Internet" was coined.

Search Engines
By 1990, the Internet was complex enough to require search engines. Canada' Archie search engine was developed in 1990 as was Webcrawler. This was followed by WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) and Gopher in 1991, the latter which served as a hypertext interface.

World Wide Web
Hypertext was developed in 1991, hence our "birthdate" for the Internet. The date refers not to the coining of the phrase or the development of the system, but the public availability of an easy way to present and transfer information. In other words, the "birthdate" of the Internet is really the birthdate of HTML. Mosaic was the first true web browser and came out of a funding initiative pushed into existence by Al Gore.

Comments

[siderea]

WAIS and Gopher weren't search engines were they? They were protocols, similar to the WWW, only, you know, different: successors to FTP, that allowed you to review the contents of servers. Gopher had "tunnels" instead of "links".

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

WAIS was a wide area information server (hence the name) that accessed remote databases to perform searches so it would technically be a "search engine" in that it facilitated performing searches of text documents. It might be more accurate to call it a proto-search engine because, unlike today's search engines, it didn't index the contents of these databases in a centralized fashion; rather, it depended on the databases to be self-organized. It wasn't a protocol but a search system that used a particular ANSI protocol.

Yes, gopher is more a set of protocols than a "search engine". It was essentially a hierachical data storage format, much like a file directory structure. It worked together with WAIS, Archie (the official "first" search engine in that it used a centralized database, designed at McGill specifically for FTP archives) and Veronica (a "true" search engine that archived Gopher menus) by providing a common tool for searching these archives.

To be more technically correct, Archie and Veronica were "true" search engines in the sense we know today, both using the gopher protocol to perform document searches (as in searches for documents) while WAIS servers were used to perform searches of text documents.