From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1990 to 2000 Timeline

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, students at McGill University, write ARCHIE, a program designed to index FTP archives.

ARCHIE was the first “search engine,” as distinct from a “web search engine.”

The Library of Congress begins making its collections available in digital form through the American Memory project.

Initially the files for American Memory were distributed to 44 schools and libraries on CD-ROMS.

Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow found the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is founded. By the end of its first year its membership consisted of 18 institutions.

ARPANET discontinues operations and merges into the Internet

American sculptor James Sanborn creates the cryptographic sculpture, Kryptos, on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

"The name Kryptos comes from the Greek word for 'hidden', and the theme of the sculpture is 'intelligence gathering.' The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters comprising encrypted text. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard Roman alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This 'inscription' contains four separate enigmatic messages, each apparently encrypted with a different cipher."

"The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total, however Sanborn released information in April 2006 stating that an intended letter on the main half of Kryptos was missing. This would bring the total number of characters to 870 on the main portion. The other half of the sculpture comprises a Vigenère encryption tableau, comprising 869 characters, if spaces are counted. Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has since revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He said that he gave the complete solution at the time of the sculpture's dedication to CIA director William H. Webster. However, in an interview for wired.com in January 2005, Sanborn said that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part 2 it says "Who knows the exact location? Only WW," that "WW" was intended to refer to William Webster. He also confirmed that should he die before it becomes deciphered that there will be someone able to confirm the solution" (Wikipedia article on Kryptos, accessed 05-09-2009).

Steven Levy, "Mission Impossible: The Code that Even the CIA Can't Crack," Wired 17.05 (May 2009).

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN issues World Wide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project.

Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web page on a NeXT workstation.

During the Christmas holiday Tim Berners-Lee writes the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:

1, The first web browser called WorldWideWeb.

2. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

3. The first Web server, CERN httpd. It was operational on Christmas Day 1990.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET Backbone Network, clearing the way for electronic commerce.

Adobe introduces the Portable Document Format (PDF) to aid in the transfer of documents across platforms. PDF is a file format used to represent a document in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create it.

Apple introduces TrueType in competition with Adobe's PostScript.

The first TrueType fonts available were Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

J. Craig Venter and colleagues describe a fast new approach to gene discovery using Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs).

Although controversial when first introduced, ESTs were soon widely employed both in public and private sector research. They proved economical and versatile, used not only for rapid identification of new genes, but also for analyzing gene expression, gene families, and possible disease-causing mutations.

The first webcam, called the CoffeeCam, points at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University.

"The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. Employing the X Window System protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web." (quoted from the Trojan Room Coffee Machine article in Wikipedia, accessed 11-23-2008).

The camera was finally switched off on August 22, 2001. The final image captured by the camera may still be viewed at its homepage.(Accessed 11-23-2008).

Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines invents the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system.  It is client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index databases on remote computers.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) is passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243, amending the Communications Act of 1934.

"The TCPA is the primary law in the US governing the conduct of telephone solicitations, ie. telemarketing. The TCPA restricts the use of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages received by cell phones, and the use of fax machines to send unsolicited advertisements. It also specifies several technical requirements for fax machines, autodialers, and voice messaging systems -- principally with provisions requiring identification and contact information of the entity using the device to be contained in the message" (Wikipedia article on Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, accessed 10-31-2009).

Tim Berners-Lee releases the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, to a number of people at CERN.

This release introduced the web to the high energy physics community and began the spread of the World Wide Web.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) holds the First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy.

The world's first GSM (Global System for Mobil communications) phone call is made in Finland on the  Radiolinja network. 

Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, writes the Linux kernel.  

This was the origin of a software development project that brought the open-source movement into the mainstream. Torvalds started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver. Then, on August 26, 1991, he posted the following to comp.os.minix, a newsgroup on Usenet:

"Hello everybody out there using minix-

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

"I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torva...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(."

After that, many people contributed code to the project. By September 1991, Linux version 0.01 was released. It had 10,239 lines of code.

Second generation 2G cellular telecom networks are commercially launched on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard in Finland on Radiolinja's network.

"Three primary benefits of 2G networks over their predecessors were that phone conversations were digitally encrypted, 2G systems were significantly more efficient on the spectrum allowing for far greater mobile phone penetration levels; and 2G introduced data services for mobile, starting with SMS text messages.

"After 2G was launched, the previous mobile telephone systems were retrospectively dubbed 1G. While radio signals on 1G networks are analog, and on 2G networks are digital, both systems use digital signaling to connect the radio towers (which listen to the handsets) to the rest of the telephone system" (Wikipedia article on GSM, accessed 04-11-2009).

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary by Tim Berners-Lee, posted on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, gives a short summary of the World Wide Web project, explains where to download a web server and line mode browser, making it available all over the world at no cost.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system."

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Mark P. McCahill and team at the University of Minnesota develop the Gopher protocol, "a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet.," but without hyperlinks, a significant disadvantage to the World Wide Web.

They announced the Internet Gopher on USENET. Its central goals were:

"* A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users

"* A simple syntax

"* A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively

"* Extending the file system metaphor to include things like searches

" The source of the name "Gopher" is claimed to be threefold:

"1. Users instruct it to 'go for' information

"2. It does so through a web of menu items analogous to gopher holes

"3. The sports teams of the University of Minnesota are the Golden Gophers (Wikipedia article on Gopher (protocol), accessed 06-04-2009).

The first volume of the Unicode standard is published by the Unicode Consortium. 

"Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version [5.2, 2009] of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts [including Egyptian hieroglyphs] a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts) " (Wikipedia article on Unicode, accessed 01-29-2010).

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law is decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

Through the efforts of  physicist and software developer Paul Kunz and Terry Hung, the first web server in North America goes live at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

The first image posted to the web is a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes.

There are 50 Web Servers on the Internet.

The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered.

J. Craig Venter leaves the National Institutes of Health and founds The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  found an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

UNESCO launches the Memory of the World Programme, an international initiative to guard against collective amnesia, by aiming at preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.

Neal Stephenson publishes the science fiction novel, Snow Crash. In it he coins the term Metaverse to describe "how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the future."

Using a personal computer, Neil Papworth of Sema Group  sends the first commercial SMS  text message to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message is "Merry Christmas."

IBM develops scalable parallel systems, joining multiple computer processors and breaking down complex, data-intensive jobs to speed their completion.

Traffic on the Internet expands at a 341,634 percent growth rate.

OCLC publishes Electronic Dewey, the first library classification system published in electronic form.

At the Towards Federation 2001 (TF2001) meeting a group from the Australian library and archives sectors is organized to develop appropriate guidelines for the preservation of information in electronic form. This will evolve into the National Library of Australia's Preserving Access to Digital Information Initiative (PADI).

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photograph and develop a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. It is the first library of digital images on the Internet.

Richard Weatherford establishes Interloc, "the first successful online bookseller service."

Arguing that "our mission is to help booksellers find books for their own customers," Weatherford opened the database to booksellers only.

Villanova Law Review Symposium: The Congress, The Courts, and Computer-Based Communications Networks: Answering Questions About Access and Content Control is "perhaps the first law review symposium dedicated to cyberspace."

At this time it is estimated that in China, a country with about 1,000,000,000 people, only about 2000 people use the Internet.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is founded.

David Allen and Harold Williams found Teleport, the first commercially successful telepresence company. Its name was later changed to Teleport.

"The original intent was to develop a system that could allow families to interact across great distances without the hassle or costliness of flying. The first systems (which they called TeleSuites) looked more like something out of an upper class home rather than a conference room in an office suite. . . . " 

The British Library and Kevin S. Kiernan at the University of Kentucky embark on the Electronic Beowulf project, an effort to photograph and publish high resolution electronic copies of the manuscript.

The Electronic Beowulf was a pioneering effort in the digital preservation, restoration, and dissemination of manuscript material.

"The equipment we are using to capture the images is the Roche/Kontron ProgRes 3012 digital camera, which can scan any text, from a letter or a word to an entire page, at 2000 x 3000 pixels in 24-bit color. The resulting images at this maximum resolution are enormous, about 21-25 MB, and tax the capabilities of the biggest machines. Three or four images - three or four letters or words if that is what we are scanning - will fill up an 88 MB hard disk, and we have found that no single image of this size can be processed in real time without at least 64 MB of RAM. In our first experiments in June with the camera and its dedicated hardware, we transmitted a half-dozen images by phone line from the Conservation Studio of the British Library to the Wenner Gren Imaging Laboratory at the University of Kentucky, where identical hardware was set up to receive the data. Most of these images are now available on the Internet through anonymous ftp or Mosaic."

Steven Spielberg directs the science fiction techno-thriller film Jurassic Park, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, and adapted by him for the screen.

With gross sales of $914,000,000 when released, Jurassic Park is also among the high-grossing and most profitable films ever made.

The plot of Jurassic Park centers around the possibility of re-creating dinosaurs by

"cloning genetic material found in mosquitoes that fed on dinosaur blood, preserved in Dominican amber. The DNA from these samples was spliced with DNA from frogs to fill in sequence gaps. Only female dinosaurs are created in order to prevent uncontrolled breeding within the park" (Wikipedia article on Jurassic Park [film], accessed 05-25-2009)

This was the first film to integrate computer generated images and animatronic dinosaurs seemlessly into live action scenes.

"In 1993, Dr. Glen Barry invented blogging, defined as web based commentary, linking to other articles. 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. Prior to this, Dr. Barry provided forest conservation materials via email and bulletin board since 1989. The work has since evolved into the world's largest environmental portals at http://www.ecoearth.info/" (Wikipedia article on History of blogging timeline, accessed 04-21-2009).

Psychologist, neural scientist and cognitive scientist James A. Anderson publishes "The BSB Model: A simple non-linear autoassociative network," M. Hassoun (Ed), Associative Neural Memories: Theory and Implementation (1993).

Anderson's neural networks have been applied to models of human concept formation, decision making, speech perception, and models of vision.

Anderson, J. A., Spoehr, K. T. and Bennett, D.J.  "A study in numerical perversity: Teaching arithmetic to a neural network,"  D.S. Levine and M. Aparicio (Eds.) Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference, (1994).

"In 1993 total Internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year" (http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.html, accessed 06-04-2009).

There are 250 web servers on the Internet.

Peter F. Brown and colleagues at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center publish "The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation," Computational Linguistics, 19 (2) 263-311:

"We describe a series of five statistical models of the translation process and give algorithms for estimating the parameters of these models given a set of pairs of sentences that are translations of one another. We define a concept of word-by-word alignment between such pairs of sentences. For any given pair of such sentences each of our models assigns a probability to each of the possible word-by-word alignments. We give an algorithm for seeking the most probable of these alignments. Although the algorithm is suboptimal, the alignment thus obtained accounts well for the word-by-word relationships in the pair of sentences. We have a great deal of data in French and English from the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament. Accordingly, we have restricted our work to these two languages; but we,feel that because our algorithms have minimal linguistic content they would work well on other pairs of languages. We also feel, again because of the minimal linguistic content of our algorithms, that it is reasonable to argue that word-by-word alignments are inherent in any sufficiently large bilingual corpus."

"The first ideas of statistical machine translation were introduced by Warren Weaver in 1949, including the ideas of applying Claude Shannon's information theory. Statistical machine translation was re-introduced in 1991 by researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and has contributed to the significant resurgence in interest in machine translation in recent years. Nowadays it is by far the most widely-studied machine translation method" (Wikipedia article on Statistical machine translation, accessed 05-14-2010).

Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge calls the creation of the first ultraintelligent machine the Singularity in Omni magazine.

Vinge's follow-up paper entitled "What is the Singularity?" presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993, and  slightly changed in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review, contains the oft-quoted statement,

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

"Vinge refines his estimate of the time scales involved, adding, 'I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.

"Vinge continues by predicting that superhuman intelligences, however created, will be able to enhance their own minds faster than the humans that created them. 'When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid.' This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence, he predicts, will cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period of time" (Wikipedia article on Technological singularity, accessed 05-24-2009).

The science fiction television series Babylon 5 becomes the first television series  becomes the first television series to use computer generated images (CGI) as the primary method for its visual effects (rather than using hand-built models). It also marked the first TV use of virtual sets.

Wired 1.01, a magazine of cyberculture, is published under the editorship of Kevin Kelly.

Marc Andreesen announces on Usenet the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag.

AT&T introduces the AT&T EO Personal Communicator, the first tablet computer with wireless connectivity via a cellular phone.

The device was developed by GO/EO, a subsidiary of GO Corporation, both of which were acquired by AT&T in 1993.

"Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880 were produced and measured about the size of a small clipboard. Both were powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code from the C programming language. They also contained a host of I/O ports - modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The device came with a wireless cellular network modem, a built-in microphone with speaker and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.

"Perhaps the most interesting part was the operating system, PenPoint OS, created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS never gained widespread use. Also equally compelling was the tightly integrated applications suite, Perspective, licensed to EO by Pensoft" (Wikipedia article on EO Personal Communicator, accessed 02-03-2010).

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is established "under terms of letters of guidance from the Secretaries of State to the newly-established Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland, and Wales, inviting them to establish a Joint Committee to deal with networking and specialist information services."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) introduces Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

CERN releases the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

Tim O’Reilly launches the Global Network Navigator. This the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it contains the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator will be sold to America Online in 1995.

Matthew Gray at MIT develops the web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer, to measure the size of the web.

Later in the year the World Wide Web Wanderer was used to generate an index called the "Wandex", providing thewhat was probably the first web search engine.

Alan Saperstein  of Visual Data Corporation, now Onstream Media, introduces streaming video with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. This is the beginning of video webcasting over the Internet.

Benny Landa of Indigo introductes the Indigo E-Print 1000 digital offset press, incorporating ElectroInk technology, also called ink-based electrophotography.

"Everywhere on the global Internet, which is now roamed by an estimated 15 million computer users, the growth rates are staggering.

"At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill., a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October. Officials at the center say the only solution may be to take a $15 million supercomputer away from its normal scientific number-crunching duties and employ it full time as an electronic librarian.

"This year, information retrieved using a popular searching program called Gopher increased more than 400 percent, to almost 200 billion bytes a month -- about seven million newspaper pages" (John Markoff, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, accessed 06-04-2009).

Martijn Koster develops ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer, this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It will be demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994.

"Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

Edward A. Fox issues Sourcebook on Digital Libraries. Version 1.0. The earliest reference in the bibliography is the April 1991 issue of Byte magazine. Most other references are to works published in 1992.

At Xerox PARC Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser describe proposed electronic features of the "national information infrastructure" in a paper entitled Libraries are More than Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries. All references cited in this paper are to printed publications.

The number of websites reaches 10,000. There are 2500 web servers on the Internet.

The British Library Oriental and India Office Collections acquires

"a collection of twenty-nine fragments of manuscripts written on birch bark scrolls in the Gāndhārī (a dialect of Prakrit) language and in the Kharohī script. They were contained inside a clay pot, also bearing an inscription in the same language, in which they had been buried in antiquity. Preliminary analysis of these documents indicated that they dated from about the first century A.D., which would make them the oldest surviving substantial collection of Buddhist manuscripts, as well as of any kind of Indian manuscripts."

The National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative makes its first six awards. One of these is The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project:

"This project . . . is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal' library, proving uniform access to the large number of emerging networked information sources and collections. These include both on-line versions of pre-existing works and new works and media of all kinds that will be available on the globally interlinked computer networks of the future. The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists. The technology developed in this project will provide the "glue" that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion."

An early web search engine, the World Wide Web Worm, has an index of 110,000 pages and web-accessible documents. It receives an average of 1500 queries per day.

The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to 155 Mbps as traffic passes 10 trillion bytes per month.

HTTP (Web) packets surpass FTP traffic as the largest-volume Internet protocol.

NSFNET reverts back to a research network, and the main U. S. backbone traffic now goes through interconnected network providers.

The first demonstration of wireless Internet access occurs at Bell Labs.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is founded in Washington, D.C. "to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values."

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, publishes in Wired an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

This or a very similar text was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

On the Internet Kevin Hughes publishes a pioneering cultural and historical work entitled From Webspace to Cyberspace.

Gary Kremen and Peng T. Ong start the online dating site Match.com.

"The initial business scope developed by this team included a possible subscription model, now common among personals services, and inclusion of diverse communities with high first trial and market leaders status, including women, technology professionals and the GLBT community. Fran Maier joined in late 1994 to lead the Match.com business unit where she significantly bolstered the strategy to make Match.com friendly and accessible to women (the men would then follow)" (Wikipedia article on Match.com).

While working on the Netscape web browser, Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II builds the Fishcam, one of the earliest live image websites.

Netscape hosted the Fishcam until long after they were no longer Netscape. After a short hiatus, in 2009 it found a new host.  

When this note was written in May 2009 the Fishcam was operational and remained  one of the longest nearly continuously running live websites.

Jim Sterne launches the first "Marketing on the Internet" seminar series.

This eight-city tour was intended to promote the possibilities of using the Internet for advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service.

At the Second Man-Machine World Championship, Chinook, a computer checkers program developed around 1989 at the University of Alberta by a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer, wins due to human frailty.

This was the first time that a computer program defeated a human champion in a game competition.  "In 1996 the Guinness Book of World Records recognized Chinook as the first program to win a human world championship" (http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/project/, accessed 01-24-2010).

Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, starts his web-based diary Justin's Links from the Underground, Links.net, offering one of the earliest guided tours of the web. This is considered one of the earliest blogs.

Apple introduces the first consumer-priced digital camera that works with a personal computer-- the QuickTake 100.

"A one-day, constrained-size workshop addendum to the annual CAIA conference" is held in San Antonio, Texas, on the emerging topic of digital libraries. It issues the report: Digital Library: Gross Structure and Requirements.

Commissioned to develop an Internet event for "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future," an arts weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Ivan Pope writes a proposal outlining the concept of a café with Internet access from the tables. Pope's Cybercafe, the first Internet cafe, operates during the weekend event.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  change the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang select the name because they like the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL is akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They will create the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Marc Andreesen, one of the programmers of Mosaic, and James H. Clark of Silicon Graphics found Mosaic Communications Corporation, the first company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser, and the first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.

Commercial spamming starts when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegeluse bulk Usenet postings to advertise immigration law services. This is called the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings: "Green Card Lottery-Final One?"

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, becomes operational. "Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public".

The Directors of 15 major academic libraries in the United States, and the President of the Commission on Preservation and Access found The Digital Library Federation for "The implementation of a distributed, open digital library conforming to the overall theme and accessible across the global Internet. This library shall consist of collections--expanding over time in number and scope -- to be created from the conversion to digital form of documents contained in our and other libraries and archives, and from the incorporation of holdings already in electronic form."

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcasts over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

A Workshop on Digital Libraries: Current Issues occurs at Rutgers University.

The First International Conference on the World Wide Web takes place at CERN in Geneva.

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invents the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

Entepeneur Ariel Poler founds Internet Profiles Corporation ( I/PRO), the first commercial web analytics vendor, producer of the first log analyzer.

"The company emerged as the early market leader in the developing field of web usage measurement, partly because of its partnership with the venerable Neilsen Media Research . . . and Neilsen Media Services in . . . 1995." (Peters, Computerized Monitoring and Online Privacy [1999] 343).

The first annual conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries meets at College Station, Texas.

The first public rendition of whitehouse.gov, "Welcome to the White House," goes online.

The Library of Congress announces The National Digital Library Program.

Marc Andreesen of Mosaic Communications Corporation releases Mosaic Netscape 0.9, beta on USENET: 

"Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

"You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

"ftp.mcom.com in /netscape

"gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm

"lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape

"ftp.meer.net in /Netscape doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape

"archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape

"ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only) mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

"Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.  

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to rele...@mcom.com.  

"Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.  

"A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i...@mcom.com for more information.

"Have fun!

"Marc and the gang

i...@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/"

One month later, in November 1994 the company renamed itself Netscape Communications Corporation.

The Unites States Court of Appeals decides Steve Jackson Games v. U.S. Secret Service,36 F.3d 457 (5th Cir. 1994).

"The narrow issue before us is whether the seizure of a computer, used to operate an electronic bulletin board system, and containing private electronic mail which had been sent to (stored on) the bulletin board, but not read (retrieved) by the intended recipients, constitutes an unlawful intercept under the Federal Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. s 2510, et seq., as amended by Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub.L. No. 99-508, Title I, 100 Stat. 1848 (1986). We hold that it is not, and therefore AFFIRM."

A Rolling Stones concert becomes the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opens the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse." (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) becomes the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC uses an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994. WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) starts streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this is WREK's beta launch and the stream will not be advertised until a later date.

The Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) creates the Task Force on Digital Archiving. The purpose of the Task Force is to investigate the means of ensuring “continued access indefinitely into the future of records stored in digital electronic form.” On May 1, 1996 the group will issue its report: Preserving Digital Information.

Sony launches its first PlayStation game console in Japan.

Randy Conrads founds Classmates.com. It may be the first for-profit social networking website.

WebtraffIQ.com develops the first commercial web page tagging system.

During this year up to 700 new web servers are registered each day, and there are approximately 73,500 servers. WWW is generally equated with the Internet.

The U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began publication of statistics in print in 1886, begins publishing statistics on its website.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founds craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It will evolve into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist will eventually make a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

Ward Cunningham establishes the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ You can watch a video of an interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum in 2006 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6nNqSASGo

Robert McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, and a group of collaborative software developers initially known as the Apache Group, make the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server software.

"Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server software in use. As of September 2009 Apache served over 54.48% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest."

"There have been two explanations of the project's name. According to the Apache Foundation, the name was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare. However, the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website, from 1996 to 2001, claimed that The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server. The first explanation was supported at an Apache Conference and in an interview in 2000 by Brian Behlendorf, who said that the name connoted 'Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass'. Behlendorf then contradicted this in a 2007 interview, stating that 'The Apache server isn't named in honor of Geronimo's tribe' but that so many revisions were sent in that 'the group called it 'a patchy Web server' '. Both explanations are probably appropriate" (Wikipedia article on Apache HTTP server, accessed 02-02-2010).

Stanford University Libraries found HighWire Press. Its initial publication is the online production of the weekly Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), "the most highly cited (and second largest) peer-reviewed journal."

A portion of its mission statement (June 1995) includes the following:

"Network-Based Scholarly Publishing:

A Prospectus

The Problems:

The problems of scholarly publishing - particularly for science, technology and medical information (STM) - are well documented:

It takes too long for authors to get work into the literature because of the author, reviewer, publisher, library, reader handoffs.

It is difficult and time consuming for readers to sort through all that is published.

It is increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire STM materials, which are advancing in price to research libraries at four to six times the c.p.i.

It is becoming impractical for publishers to deliver a timely and complete product that meets the needs of research scientists. As single events, these problems are each frustrating to scholars and those who serve them. In combination, these impediments are a significant barrier, and challenge the productivity and quality of science.

The Projects:

The Network Publishing project, dubbed "The HighWire Press," provides models of solutions for these problems by taking advantage of the special circumstances of scholarly communication - as distinct from entertainment or trade publishing - in the context of a University community: the writers and readers of scholarly materials are in the same profession, writing for each other, they are located in similar environments; and they do not seek profit from their publishing activities, which are a means to an end for them. Because of network-based communication technologies, the apparatus of a large publishing operation is becoming unnecessary for communication of scholarly results; this is true for the same reason that desktop publishing technologies a decade ago allowed a shift from large design and composition shops to desktop authorship backed up by small, responsive print shops. Essentially, our projects attempt to "re-engineer" traditional scholarly publishing to focus on formal, structured communication among the community of scholars."

Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com as an online bookstore. 

"The first book Amazon sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" (Wikipedia article on Amazon.com, accessed 03-20-2010).

The Corporation for National Research Initiiatives, sponsored by DARPA, begins publication, only on the web, of D-lib Magazine, the Magazine of the Digital Library Forum.

Netscape Communications has a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

Pierre M. Omidyar founds eBay as a sole proprietorship.

Initially he conducted auctions under the name AuctionWeb, and advertised items for auction on USENET.

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now  becomes the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This is the beginning of IP/TV.

Web search engine Altavista is launched. It receives 300,000 hits on its first day.

According to UNESCO, 968,735 new different printed book titles are produced in the world this year.

The used and antiquarian bookselling website Abebooks.com is launched.

The Swedish Royal Library (Kungl. Biblioteket) initiates the Kulturarw3 Project - The Royal Swedish Web Archiw3e.

Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive.

IBM announces the DB2 Universal Database, the first fully scalable, Web-ready database management system. It is called “universal” because it can sort and query alphanumeric data as well as text documents, images, audio, video and other complex objects. In 1996 IBM databases manage about 70 percent of the world’s business information.

This year more email is sent than paper mail.

There are 14,352,000 Internet hosts and 100,000 websites.

IBM introduces continuous speech recognition technology for Mandarin Chinese. In developing the product, researchers identified and classified thousand of vocal tones and homonyms, created an algorithm that deconstructs syllables into parts, and developed a new language model to transform spoken words into the right combination drawn from 6,700 Chinese characters.

IBM also announces software that gives people a hands-free way to dictate text and navigate the desktop with the power of natural speech.

LexisNexis online services exceed one billion documents.

In response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow writes A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

"The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet" (Wikipedia article on Mobile web, accessed 04-25-2009).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, begin collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

Citation analysis, referenced in this database, was pioneered by Eugene Garfield beginning in 1955.

The first recorded use of the term "phishing" (baits used to "catch financial information and passwords) occurs on the "alt.online-service. America-online" Usenet newsgroup after AOL introduces measures to prevent using fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to open accounts. To obtain legitimate credit card information AOL crackers resorted to phishing.

The New York Times interactive web edition begins.

The first ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries takes place in Bethesda, Maryland.

Seachenginewatch.com goes online as "A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines."

Internet personality and lifecaster Jennifer Ringley begins the popular website, JenniCam. She was the first real full time online webcam girl.

"Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities.

"In June 2008, CNET hailed JenniCam as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.

"Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straight-forward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and viewers were stimulated both for its sociological implications and for sexual arousal. Surveillance became conceptual art, as noted by Mark Tribe in 'New Media Art':

In Web sites like JenniCAM, in which a young woman installed Web cameras in her home to expose her everyday actions to online viewers. . . surveillance became a source of voyeuristic and exhibitionistic excitement. . . Institutional surveillance and the invasion of privacy have been widely explored by New Media artists.'

"Ringley's genuine desires to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her private parts, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years" (Wikipedia article on Jennifer Ringley, accessed 05-08-2009).

DVD specification 1.0 is finalized.

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, in March 1997 in the United States. The first movie commercially released on DVD was Twister.

The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition & Technology publishes the unclassified REPORT OF THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON INFORMATION WARFARE - DEFENSE (IW-D.

This 212-page report was a "call to arms" for cyber warfare or information warfare in the United States

At a Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopts the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

126,000,000 metric tons of paper are consumed in the world.

The Internet2 consortium is established.

The IEEE Computer Society establishes the Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. "It is to promote research in the theory and practice of all aspects of Collective Memory, i.e. the fields of Digital Libraries, Digital Museums and Digital Archives of all kinds."

The California Digital Library is founded "by University of California President Emeritus Richard Atkinson to build the University's digital library, assist campus libraries with sharing their resources and holdings more effectively, and provide leadership in applying technology to the development of library collections and services."

SixDegrees.com, an early social networking website, is founded.

Michael Lesk attempts to calculate "How Much Information is There in the World?" He includes information on how much information a human brain may be able to retain.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) of the University of Virginia, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (CVRLab), the UCLA Experiential Technology Center (ETC), the Reverse Engineering (INDACO) Lab at the Politecnico di Milano, the Ausonius Institute of the CNRS and the University of Bordeaux-3, and the University of Caen begin collaboration on a project to create a digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in late antiquity. The notional date of the model is June 21, 320 A.D.

"The primary purpose of this phase of the project was to spatialize and present information and theories about how the city looked at this moment in time, which was more or less the height of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire. A secondary, but important, goal was to create the cyberinfrastructure whereby the model could be updated, corrected, and augmented. Spatialization and presentation involve two related forms of communication: (1) the knowledge we have about the city has been used to reconstruct digitally how its topography, urban infrastructure (streets, bridges, aqueducts, walls, etc.), and individual buildings and monuments might have looked; and (2) whenever possible, the sources of archaeological information or speculative reasoning behind the digital reconstructions, as well as valuable online resources for understanding the sites of ancient Rome, have been made available to users. The model is thus a representation of the state of our knowledge (and, implicitly, of our ignorance) about the urban topography of ancient Rome at various periods of time. Beyond this primary use, the model can function in other ways. It can be used to teach students or the general public about how the city looked; it can be used to gather data not otherwise available, such as the alignment of built features in the city with respect to each other or to natural features and phenomena; and, it can be used to run urban or architectural experiments not otherwise possible, such as how well the city or the buildings within it functioned in terms of heating and ventilation, illumination, circulation of people, etc. Finally, a digital model can be easily updated to reflect corrections to the model or new archaeological discoveries."

"Starting on June 11, 2007, when the model of ancient Rome was first shown publicly at a ceremony in Rome, a number of video fly-throughs and static images of the model were posted for free public viewing online. In August, 2008, the alpha version of Rome Reborn 2.0 was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In November, 2008, the latest version of Rome Reborn 1.0 was published to the Internet as in Google Earth." (quotations from the Rome Reborn website of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, accessed 01-21-2009)

Nettracker.com produces the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

Incorporating scans begun in 1992, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launches the digital library Gallica, " la bibliothèque virtuelle de l'honnête homme."

On August 1, 2009 Gallica contained:

"Documents moissonnés

bibliothèques partenaires : 5,834

partenaires commerciaux : 12,133

Total : 17,967

Documents de la BnF

Imprimés

114,397 monographies, dont 59,651 consultables en mode texte

3,471 titres de périodiques, représentant 526,223 fascicules dont 213,122 en mode texte

Documents iconographiques : 38,493 lots, représentant approximativement 111,643 images"

Cartes et plans : 5,008 documents

Documents sonores : 1,056 documents

Documents manuscrits : 4,164 documents

Musique notées : 2,127 documents (http://gallica.bnf.fr/content?lang=en#stats).

Physicist and inventor Joseph Jacobson, of the MIT Media Lab,  founds E Ink Corporation to develop electrophoretic display technology, or electronic paper, (e-paper, epaper), which he invented.

The first Museums and the Web Conference takes place in Los Angeles. 

The Joint Bi-l evel Image Experts Group (JBIG) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (ITU-T SG8) Coding of Still Pictures issue the report entitled Call for Contributions for JPEG 2000 (JTC 1.29.14, 15444): Image Coding System. This will eventually lead to the establishment of the JPEG 2000 file standard for still images.

There are one million websites on the Internet.

RLG DigiNews, RLG's online newsletter for digital libraries and preservation, begins publication on the web.

Gary Kasparov, sometimes regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, resigns 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second.

This was the first time that a human world chess champion lost to a computer under tournament conditions.

The event was broadcast live from IBM's website via a Java viewer, and became the world's record "Net event" at the time.

"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:  

" 'By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.'

"It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books, 57, February 11, 2010).

Wireless Application Protocol or WAP is established as a secure specification that allows users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union all 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court vote to strike down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violate the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices concur in part and dissent in part to the decision. This is the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Court rules that "223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.

"The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the 'knowing' transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything 'that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs' " (Wikipedia article on Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union).

A human error at Network Solutions causes the Domain Name System (DNS) table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. In the four hours it took to repair the error the problem spread throughout the Internet.

Digital Scriptorium, an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research, first appears on the web.

Web search engine Altavista claims to handle 20,000,000 queries per day.

Virtual Medical Worlds, "a monthly Virtual Magazine on Telemedicine and High Performance Computing and Networking for readers interested in computer applications in medical environments," initiates publication on the Internet.

W3C releases the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels.

Voice over Internet equipment, using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), becomes available.

The average person receives 733 pieces of mail on paper per year, half of which is junk mail.

MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) is introduced. It is an audio compression technology being a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications. MP3 compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 8­12, while maintaining almost the same high-fidelity sound quality.

Richard-Gabriel Rummonds's Printing on the Iron Handpress is published. This elegantly produced definitive book on the operation of historic handpress printing technology, illustrated by photographs and line drawings, is printed by high-speed photo-offset rather than manual letterpress printing. It includes an annotated bibliography of prior printing manuals published in English. The introduction by Harry Duncan concludes:

". . . anyone who does stay the course and follow to the end the directives given here can count on acquiring a consummate, tried, and true method for handling an instrument that has never been surpassed, that still calls for a printer's full participation, physical as well as mental, in order to achieve the best work of which he is capable."

The National Library of Australia initiates its Digital Services Project with the goal of establishing a web archive. This evolved into PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of the United States begins the Electronic Records Archives Program (ERA) for the eventual preservation of digital archives.

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger publish the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses:

“A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.” The manifesto is first published online, followed by a book.

Bell Labs reports the first long-distance transmission of one terabit (trillion bits) of data per second over a single strand of optical fiber.

The last printed edition of Friedrich Konrad Beilstein's Handbuch der organischen Chemie, is published.

The first edition of this work, published in 1881, covered 1,500 compounds in 2,200 pages. By 1998 the research, incorporating information from 1779 to the present, grew to more than 7,000,000 compounds, and the subscription price reached about $40,000 per year.

Publication of this work continues online as the Beilstein database.  Norman, From Gutenberg to the Internet (2005) 11.

You've Got Mail, an American romantic comedy film starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is released by Warner Brothers. The film dramatizes a romantic relationship that develops over email, featuring AOL's "You've got mail" slogan in product placement. Paralleling this film about computers and society is the film's subplot of the forced closure of a small independent bookshop by competition from a big-box chain bookstore — thus not only a film about computers and romance but also a commentary about the changing face of the book trade.

Cognitive scientist / entrepeneur Jeffrey Stibel, physicist, psychologist, neural scientist  James A. Anderson, and others create a word sense disambiguator using George A. Miller's WordNet lexical database.

Stibel and others applied this technology in Simpli, "an early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter in a search term that was ambiguous (e.g., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas)."

"The technology was rooted in brain science and built by academics to model the way in which the mind stored and utilized language."

"Simpli was sold in 2000 to NetZero. Another company that leveraged the Simpli WordNet technology was purchased by Google and they continue to use the technology for search and advertising under the brand Google AdSense.

"In 2001, there was a buyout of the company and it was merged with another company called Search123. Most of the original members joined the new company. The company was later sold in 2004 to ValueClick, which continues to use the technology and search engine to this day" (Wikipedia article on Simpli, accessed 05-10-2009).

American filmaker Terry Sanders, the American Film Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources,  and the American Council of Learned Societies issue Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age.

This film, narratived by Robert McNeil, was a sequel to Slow Fires (1987), noticed in this database. It "explores the hidden crisis of the digital information age. Will digitally stored information and knowledge survive into the future? Will humans twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now have access to the electronically recorded history of our time?" (from the American Film Foundation blurb; it was available in 33 and 58 minute versions on July 28, 2009). The film includes interviews with Peter Norton and Tim Berners-Lee.

According to Bowker, as cited by Robert Darnton in Publisher's Weekly, 700,000 new book titles are published worldwide during 1998.

Marc Levoy and team begin The Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford University using laser scanners to digitize the statues of Michelangelo, and 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome.

The quality of the scans was so high that the Italian government would not permit the release of the full data set on the Internet; however, the Stanford researchers built a system called ScanView that allowed viewing of details of specific parts of the statue, including parts that would be inaccessible to a normal museum visitor. You can download Scanview at this link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/scanview/ (accessed 12-23-2009).

The laser scan data for Michelangelo's David was utilized in its cleaning and restoration that began in September 2002. This eventually resulted in a 2004 book entitled Exploring David: Diagnostic Tests and State ofConservation.

"In preparation for this restoration, the Galleria dell'Accademia undertook an ambitious 10-year program of scientific study of the statue and its condition. Led by Professor Mauro Matteini of CNR-ICVBC, a team of Italian scientists studied every inch of the statue using color photography, radiography (i.e. X-rays), ultraviolet fluorescence and thermographic imaging, and several other modalities. In addition, by scraping off microsamples and performing in-situ analyses, the mineralogy and chemistry of the statue and its contaminants were characterized. Finally, finite element structural analyses were performed to determine the origin of hairline cracks that are visible on his ankles and the tree stump, to decide if intervention was necessary. (They decided it wasn't; these cracks arose in 1871, when the statue briefly tilted forward 3 degrees due to settling of the ground in the Piazza Signoria. This tilt was one of the reasons they moved the statue to the Galleria dell'Accademia.)  

"The results of this diagnostic campaign are summarized in the book Exploring David . . . . The book, written in English, also contains a history of the statue and its past restorations, a visual analysis of the chisel marks of Michelangelo as evident from the statue surface, and an essay by museum director Franca Falletti on the difficulties of restoring famous artworks. . . .  

"Aside from its sweeping scientific vision, what is remarkable about this book is that many of the studies employed a three-dimensional computer model of the statue - the model created by us during the Digital Michelangelo Project. Although we worked hard to create this model, and we envisioned 3D models eventually being used to support art conservation, we did not expect such uses to become practical so soon. After all, our model of the David is huge; outside our laboratory and a few others in the computer graphics field, little software exists that can manipulate such large models. However, with help from Roberto Scopigno and his team at CNR-Pisa, museum director Franca Falletti prodded, encouraged, and cajoled the scientists working under her direction to use our model wherever possible. We contributed a chapter to this book, on the scanning of the statue, but we take no credit for its use in the rest of the book. In fact, to us at Stanford University, the timing of our scanning project relative to the statue's restoration and the creation of this book seems merely fortuitious. However, Falletti insists that she had this use of our model in mind all along! In any case, this is a landmark book - the most extensive use that has ever been made of a 3D computer model in an art conservation project" (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/book/book.html, accessed 12-23-2009).

On July 21, 2009 the team announced that they had a "full-resolution (1/4mm) 3D model of Michelangelo's 5-meter statue of David", containing "about 1 billion polygons."

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.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group publish on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. "The worldwide web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling life of less than one year."

According to his paper, Mapping the World of Science, Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index built on the principles of citation analysis, covered nearly 20,000,000 printed source articles and 300 million cited printed references over a 50-year period.

Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf, of TCP/IP fame, publish on paper An Open Architecture for a Digital Library System and a Plan for its Development, describing "an open architecture for an important new kind of national information infrastructure."

The Internet Society (ISOC) meets to discuss the growing spam problem.

J. Craig Venter founds Celera Genomics, with Applera Corporation (Applied Biosystems), to sequence and assemble the human genome.

Microsoft launches MSN Search, a search engine, index and web crawler.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google.

They described the technology in a paper entitled  "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, 107-117.

The first Google index included 26,000,000 web pages.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is founded to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN's tasks include responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. . .  ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes" (Wikipedia article in ICANN, accessed 05-16-2010).

The U.S. Congress passes the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Supercomputer ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM. It can perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and has over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC). It would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer can perform in a single second.

The MyFamily.com website is launched. with additional free sites beginning in March, 1999. The site generated 1 million registered users within its first 140 days. The company raised more than $90 million in venture capital from investors and changed its name on November 17, 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc., to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyHistory.com.

Reference: http://www.paulallen.net/my-companies, accessed 12-18-2008.

Database consultant Hank Estrin creates and makes operational Where's George?, a website that tracks the natural geographic circulation of American paper money.

"A hit is when a bill registered with Where's George? is re-entered into the database. Where's George? does not have specific goals other than tracking currency movements, but many users like to collect interesting patterns of hits, called bingos. The most common bingo involves getting at least one hit in all 50 states (called "50 State Bingo"). Another Bingo, FRB Bingo, is when a user gets hits on bills from all 12 Federal Reserve Banks.

"Most bills do not receive any responses, or hits, but many bills receive two or more hits. The average hit rate is slightly over 11.1%. Double- and triple-hitters are common, and bills with 4 or 5 hits are not unheard of. Almost daily a bill receives its 6th hit. The site record is held by a $1 bill with 15 entries.

"To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users (called "Georgers") may write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.wheresgeorge.com and track the bill's travels. Bills that are entered into the database, but not marked, are known as stealths" (Wikipedia article on Where's George, accessed 05-04-2009).

64,711 new books are published on paper in the United States this year.

The British Government issues a white paper, Modernising Government, setting among its goals that by 2004 all newly created public records will be electronically stored and retrieved. 

It requires about 756,000,000 trees to produce the world’s annual paper supply. “The UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999 estimates that paper production provides 1,510 sheets of paper per inhabitant of the world on average, although in fact the inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper annually (15 reams), according to the ENST report. At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents.”

Thus computers have not reduced paper usuage; if anything, because nearly everyone who owns a personal computer also owns a printer, the amount of printing being done has increased.

The U. S. Supreme Court rules that Internet domain names are property.

The Early English Books Online project, a joint effort between the University of Michigan, Oxford University and ProQuest Information and Learning, begins to provide searchable texts of all 125,000 English books printed from 1475 to 1700. This is a development of a project that began in 1938 to microfilm all English books in the timeframe.

The LOCKSS digital library preservation program ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") begins intensive testing at Stanford University. It is developed in order to allow libraries to retain copies of digital publications they purchase.

Heritage Microfilm launches NewspaperARCHIVE.com, making available newspaper pages from 1759 to the present. In December 2008 it will advise:

The short range wireless networking standard, Bluetooth, is announced.

The Matrix, a science fiction-martial arts-action film,

"describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix: a simulated reality created by sentient machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Upon learning this, computer programmer "Neo" is drawn into a rebellion against the machines. The film contains many references to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures; philosophical and religious ideas; and homages to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, and Japanese animation" (Wikipedia article on The Matrix, accessed 12-23-2008).

NTT DoCoMo introduces the mobile web to Japan with the first full internet service on mobile phones, and the first mobile-specific web browser. 

The Better Business Bureau warns about Nigerian spams. These letter scams had previously operated for perhaps 100 years by snail mail.

"For Immediate Release

"June 10, 1999 - The wording is very familiar to Better Business Bureaus nationwide …only the method of contact, and country of origin have changed:

"* 'We respectfully invite your kind attention to the transfer of U.S. $25 million into your personal/company offshore account.'

"* 'you will receive 20% of the total sum, 10% for miscellaneous expenses and the remaining 70% is for me and my colleagues.'

"* 'It is our sincere conviction that you will handle this transaction with absolute confidentiality, maturity and utmost sense of purpose.'

"* 'such transaction to commence within 10 business days.'

"These statements are typical of the lures contained in what's commonly referred to as 'Nigerian Letter Scams.' The BBB warns that these scams have recently gone high-tech and are emanating from several countries throughout Africa, as well as New Zealand, Brazil and Great Britain. Members of the BBB nationwide report that such pitches now arrive unannounced and uninvited in their fax and email boxes.

"The letters are usually signed by someone who 'represents' the relevant country's Ministry of Commerce or Finance or the Department of Petroleum Resources. The writer claims that huge funds are left over from a deliberately inflated construction contract or purchase order and he's seeking to ship the funds offshore.

" 'Now that the Nigerian letter scam has gone high-tech and is being perpetrated via fax machines and e-mails, it's more critical than ever that we educate business owners and managers to this scam,' said James L. Bast, president of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc., the umbrella organization for the nation's BBBs. 'If you receive an offer from a stranger who promises a large payoff in return for assisting in transferring millions of dollars out of Nigeria or any other country, ignore it.' Some letters request copies of business letterhead; others request the name and address of the company and details about its business activities. 'Any response to this fraudulent offer will bring the con artist one step closer to being able to plunder your bank account,' Bast said" (http://www.bbb.org/alerts/article.asp?ID=41. accessed 05-08-2009).

Jim Romensko founds mediagossip.com, providing daily news, commentary, and insider information about journalism and media.

Later in 1999 Romensko was hired by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies to write the blog Romensko on the Poynter website. The blog characterizes itself as "Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos."

Shawn Fanning releases the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files.

"It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

Magid M. Abraham and Gian M. Fulgoni found comScore with the objective of creating the first service to measure trends in e-commerce.

"At the time, no market research company measured online buying behavior. The two leading online measurement companies, Media Metrix and Nielsen NetRatings, were focused solely on tracking Internet users’ site visitation behavior, providing their clients with basic metrics on the size and demographic characteristics of site audiences.

"The panels these two companies used numbered in the tens of thousands. This was far too small a sample size to accurately measure e-commerce since, on average, only 5 percent of a site’s visitors converted into buyers in any month. A panel of at least a million people would be needed. That was a daunting challenge because no research company had ever built a panel of 100,000 people, let alone a million. However, since their experience at IRI had shown that marketers spend four times as many research dollars measuring consumers’ buying behavior as they spend measuring media ratings, Magid and Gian were confident that an attractive market existed for online browsing and buying information. They decided to take on the challenge by raising and willingly investing tens of millions of dollars to discover ways in which to successfully recruit millions of opt-in panelists and develop the technology needed to capture, warehouse and analyze massive quantities of online data" (http://www.comscore.com/About_comScore/comScore_History, accessed 05-12-2009).

An unlikely alliance of disgruntled Labor backbenchers and Tories in the British Parliament defeats a move to end the centuries-old tradition of printing copies of Acts of Parliament on vellum, by 121 votes to 53. Remarkably this also shows that the centuries old debate continues on whether paper or vellum are the more permanent material for the storage of information.

"Under the scheme, already approved by the Lords, instead of two copies printed on vellum, only one would be produced on archive paper which has a life expectancy of 500 years.

“Labour's Nick Palmer, a Commons administration committee member, urged MPs to approve the change - which would have saved £30,000 a year and the skin of several goats.

“But opposition to it was led by Labour's Brian White (Milton Keynes NE) who said it would almost certainly put 12 people at William Cowley, a parchment and vellum printing company in his constituency, out of work and mean the death of the industry in Britain.

"He claimed the committee had not consulted the firm about the change until it was too late, and urged MPs to find a "different way forward that doesn't destroy an industry".

“Acts of Parliament dating back to 1497 recorded on vellum are currently held in the House of Lords Public Record Office.

“Under the proposed change duplicate copies of Acts of Parliament would also no longer be placed in the Public Record Office at Kew, replacing a resolution decreed in 1849 that two copies of every Act should be printed on vellum.

“Opening the short debate, Dr Palmer (Broxtowe) said the committee considered the change "appropriate and justifiable".

“Continuing to deposit duplicate record copies of both public and private Acts at the Public Record Offices appeared to "serve no useful purpose".

“Dr Palmer dismissed concerns about the durability of archive paper compared with vellum as "groundless".

“He said vellum and archive paper were both flammable so security could not depend alone on the document.

“Dr Palmer said he found it "attractive" that Parliament would not be using animal products where it was not necessary, although it was not one of the arguments advanced by the committee report.

“'We didn't have sentiment or animal welfare consideration affecting our judgment here, we reached it for practical, you might even say prosaic, reasons,' he said.

“Dr Palmer said British Library conservation department laboratory tests had proved that archival paper could have a life expectancy exceeding 500 years.

“But Tory Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) said: "I don't believe that this kind of tradition should lightly be tossed aside."

“Mr Howarth said the death warrant of Charles I was recorded on vellum and added: 'Who is to say whether archival paper will last 300 to 400 years? We shouldn't take the chance.' "

quoted from BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/502342.stm accessed 12-04-2008.

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (also known as Truth in Domain Names Act), is enacted into U.S. law as is part of A bill to amend the provisions of title 17, United States Code, and the Communications Act of 1934, relating to copyright licensing and carriage of broadcast signals by satellite (S. 1948). The act makes people who register domain names that are either trademarks or individual's names with the sole intent of selling the rights of the domain name to the trademark holder or individual for a profit liable to civil action.

"In order for a trademark owner to bring a claim under the ACPA, the owner must establish

• the trademark owner’s mark is distinctive or famous;
• the domain name owner acted in bad faith to profit from the mark; and
• the domain name and the trademark are either identical or confusingly similar (or dilutive for famous trademarks)" 

(Wikipedia article on Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, accessed 11-24-2008).

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was enacted in part because the domain whitehouse.com went online in 1997 as an "adult entertainment" site, leading to this letter from a Whitehouse consel:

"The following is a December letter from a White House counsel to the operator of the "whitehouse.com" adult site regarding the use of the domain and the names and images of the White House, President Clinton, and Hillary Clinton on the site:

"The White House

"Washington

"December 8, 1997

"Mr. Dan Parisi

"Secaucus, New Jersey

"Dear Mr. Parisi:

"It will come as no surprise to you that the White House Counsel's Office is aware of your Internet Web site, "www.whitehouse.com," and that we object to your use of the names and images of the White House, the President, and the First Lady on that Web site to sell memberships in an adult video club. We also recognize that you undoubtedly will use this letter as an object of humor and as an invitation to advance the claim that you are merely exercising your rights under the First Amendment.

"We too believe in the First Amendment--and in humor, although we see nothing humorous in your use of the White House domain name to draw children and other unwitting Internet users to your Web site. However distasteful your business may be, we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences. As your own online disclaimer implicitly acknowledges, the foreseeable result of your use of the White House domain name is that children will access your Web site inadvertently. Your customers will understand that such a result is unconscionable, and so, we submit, should you.

Sincerely,

Charles F.C. Ruff

Counsel to the President" (http://news.cnet.com/2009-1023-207800.html, accessed 06-15-2009).

IBM announces the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, Blue Gene, which will be 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers at the time of the announcement.

Initially Blue Gene was applied to the study of bio-molecular phenomena such as protein folding.