1960s ARPANET commissioned by US Department of Defense Term "hypertext" first coined 1973 England and Norway connected to ARPANET for research 1977 THEORYNET: First Emailing list 1979 Usenet Newsgroups set up in US:  First MUD at university of Essex 1982 TCP/IP established:  EUNet: Trans-european network setup:  Term "Internet" first used 1984 JANET (UK) academic network set up 1985 5,000 hosts on the Internet 1986 NSFNET installed - first high speed backbone 1987 10, 000hosts on the Internet 1988 IRC (real time chat system) created 1989 100,000 hosts in 13 countries 1990 Original ARPANET closed 1991 First user-friendly search/menu systems created The "World Wide Web" 1992 1,000,000 Internet hosts. Hyperlinks are here 1993 Mosaic storms web. Term "Surfing the Web" coined. "Spam" invented 1996 10,000,000 Internet hosts 1999 Internet Explorer takes over from Netscape as the most popular Browser 2002 Google indexing more than 300 million Web pages 2003 200,000,000 Internet hosts For a history of the Internet try  A Brief History of the Internet And for Internet growth  Internet History and Growth