Internet 1996

From CSI Wiki Farm

• RFC 1918 defining Private IP address space is released
• IPv6 "6Bone" is started
• Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)

• 24 Hours in Cyberspace, "the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that date, took place on the then-active website, cyber24.com
  

  

  24 Hours in Cyberspace
• Approximately 45 million people are using the Internet, with roughly 30 million of those in North America (United States and Canada), 9 million in Europe, and 6 million in Asia/Pacific (Australia, Japan, etc.).
• 43.2 million (44%) U.S. households own a personal computer, and 14 million of them are online.
• Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, and Phillipine President Fidel Ramos meet for ten minutes in an online interactive chat session on 17 January
• Telecom Act deregulates data networks.
• The controversial US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net. A few months later a three-judge panel imposes an injunction against its enforcement. Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997
• 9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service as a result of not having paid their domain name fee
• Various ISPs suffer extended service outages, bringing into question whether they will be able to handle the growing number of users. AOL (19 hours), Netcom (13 hours), AT&T WorldNet (28 hours - email only)
• Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000
• New York's Public Access Networks Corp (PANIX) is shut down after repeated SYN attacks by a cracker using methods outlined in a hacker magazine (2600)
• MCI upgrades Internet backbone adding ~13,000 ports, bringing the effective speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps
  

  

  MCI 622Mbps Backbone

• Microsoft releases Flight Simulator for Windows 95 — the first time in its 14-year history that it’s available for Windows.
• The Internet Ad Hoc Committee announces plans to add 7 new generic Top Level Domains (gTLD): .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info, .nom. The IAHC plan also calls for a competing group of domain registrars worldwide
• A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages
• The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland in this year
• The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions
• Formation of the UMTS Forum a membership organization of the dominating telcos and telecom industry companies for the interest of the third generation cell phone systems (3G).
• The Trans-Pacific cable TPC-5CN is installed between San Luis Obispo, California, USA; Guam; Hawaii; Japan; and back to Bandon, Oregon, USA. It carries 2 x 5 Gbps.
• Alteon, Extreme, Foundry, Packet Engines, Prominet, Rapid City, and Yago founded to develop Gigabit Ethernet equipment.
• Cisco acquired Granite Systems.
• Cisco acquires StrataCom, Inc., maker of switching equipment, for $4.67 billion. In the same year, one of Cisco's greatest competitors, Juniper Networks, is formed by former officials of StrataCom, Inc. Juniper has funding from several Cisco rivals -- including 3Com, Siemens/Newbridge and Northern Telecom -- and ships its first M-series router in 1997. As of 2012, the company is a $4 billion entity with a 30% share of the service provider core router market and 19% share at the edge, according to Dell'Oro Group.
• Bay Networks acquires the following:
  • Performance Technology (March) LAN-to-WAN access technology.
  • ARMON Networking, Ltd. (April) RMON and RMON2 network management technology.
  • LANcity® Corporation (October) Cable modem technology.
  • Penril Datability Networks (November) Dial-up modems and remote access products based on Digital Signal Processing technology.
  • NetICs, Inc. (December) ASIC-based Fast Ethernet switching technology.
• The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 heralds a new era in telecom competition.
• The world on an average has 12.8 main and 2.4 cellular telephone lines per 100 inhabitants, with an annual growth of 7 % and 62 % respectively. Asia and North America have 46 million cellular subscribers each, but annual growth is 106 % and 30 % respectively.
• NTT is the world's leading telecom operator by revenue (US$ 71 billion), followed by AT&T (52) and Deutsche Telekom (40). NTT is also the world's leading cellular operator (16 million subscribers). In the next years, watch out for fast growing DGT (China) and Telebras (Brazil).
• The world's leading telecom equipment manufacturers by revenue are Motorola (US$ 19 billion), Ericsson (18), Alcatel (16), Lucent (15), Siemens (15), NEC (13), and Nortel (12).
• Now known as Adobe Flash, Macromedia Flash is introduced.
• 1.5 million contactless cards are issued in Korea for bus fare.
• CREN ends its support. Since then, the network has ceased to exist.
• Smart Cards are used in local merchant stores at the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta.
• Motorola's StarTAC is the world's smallest and lightest wearable cellular telephone, weighing only 3.1ounce.
• Sun Microsystems introduces the UltraSPARC 64-bit chip and the Sun Ultra workstation.
  

  

  Sun UltraSPARC chip

• America Online launches AOL France, surpasses 7 million members, and moves from NASDAQ to NYSE under symbol "AOL".
• Yahoo! goes public on the NASDAQ under symbol YHOO.
• December 31, NCR becomes an independent company, a spin-off from AT&T. (cf 1995)
• December 20, Steve Jobs' return to Apple is announced in front of 250 cheering employees.
• December 2, Steve Jobs sets foot on Apple's Cupertino campus for the first time in 11 years.
• November, Compaq produces its one-millionth server.
• November, Compaq introduces its handheld PC, the PC companion.
• October 1, Lucent becomes an independent company, a spin-off from AT&T. (cf 1995)
• October, 1st, Cellnet, Compaq, DeTeMobil, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Mannesmann, Microsoft, Nokia, Telia, Toshiba and Vodata unite to form the Mobile Data Initiative. Learn more at the GSM Data Knowledge Site and the PCS Data Knowledge Site.
• August, 15th, Nokia starts sales of the Nokia 9000 Communicator, for the first time integrating a GSM cellular phone with a personal organizer, introduced at the CeBIT fair earlier this year. In April 1997, the communicator is featured in the movie The Saint.
• August, Transatlantic telephone cable TAT-12/13 is installed. It is a ring of undersea cable segments interconnecting cable stations in Green Hill, Rhode Island; Lands End, England; Penmarch, France; and Shirley, New York, a distance of 6,321 km. Optical amplifier technology is used. The redundant ring network carries 10 Gbps of traffic (300,000 voice circuits). The investment was US$ 1,000 per voice channel.
• August, first demonstrations of BeOS for Power Macintosh hardware.
• August 6, America Online acquires Imagination Network.
• July 4, Hotmail is launched, the first webmail service. The company was started the year before by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. In January 1998 the company was sold to Microsoft for $400 million. Prior to Hotmail, Bhatia was a systems integrator at Apple Computer, where he coordinated the design and manufacturing of Apple Powerbook. He also worked for Fire Power Systems - a Silicon Valley start up.
• July, W3C begins work on SGML/XML.
• July, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) goes through "The Great Split" as EFnet splits into two separate networks as a result of a disagreement on whether the network should use timestamps (EFnet, US-dominated) or Nick Delay (IRCnet, Europe-dominated) as a means to prevent nickname collisions.
• June, Compaq announces its Armada family of value-priced, flexible notebooks.
• June, Forbes listing of the world's richest people has (1) Bill Gates, Microsoft $18 billion, (2) Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway $15 billion, (3) Paul Sacher Family, Switzerland $13 billion, and (4) Lee Shau Kee, Hong Kong $12 billion.
• May, HotBot is launched as Wired Digital's entry into the web search engine market
• April, first public developer release of BeOS for the BeBox.
• April, more than 49 million messages have been sent since 1981 using e-mail on MTS (cf 1967).
• March, Compaq announces the LS-120, the industry's first 120 MB floppy drive.
• March 12, Swedish ISP Algonet is acquired by Telenordia.
• February 1996, Juniper Networks is started by Pradeep Sindhu, a principal scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center with $200,000 in seed money from powerful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He had the idea to supply high-performance routers to support the quickly emerging Internet in 1995 while on vacation. He hired two other engineers, Bjorn Liencres from Sun Microsystems and Dennis Ferguson from MCI. For business expertise, Sindhu recruited Scott Kriens, co-founder of StrataCom.
  

  

  Pradeep Sindhu
• January 16, Supreme Court let the Appeals Court's ruling of March 9, 1995 stand in the case between Borland and Lotus.
• January, Compaq announces 1995 sales of $14.8 billion, lifting Compaq to No. 5 computer company in the world.
• RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths
• Restrictions on Internet use around the world:
• China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police; Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve
• Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals; Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register with the state
• New Zealand: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored and seized source: Human Rights Watch
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, uk, de, jp, us, mil, ca, au
• Country domains registered: Qatar (QA), Central African Republic (CF), Oman (OM), Norfolk Island (NF), Tuvalu (TV), French Polynesia (PF), Syria (SY), Aruba (AW), Cambodia (KH), French Guiana (GF), Eritrea (ER), Cape Verde (CV), Burundi (BI), Benin (BJ) Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Andorra (AD), Guadeloupe (GP), Guernsey (GG), Isle of Man (IM), Jersey (JE), Lao (LA), Maldives (MV), Marshall Islands (MH), Mauritania (MR), Northern Mariana Islands (MP), Rwanda (RW), Togo (TG), Yemen (YE), Zaire (ZR)
• Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Justice (17 Aug), CIA (19 Sep), Air Force (29 Dec), UK Labour Party (6 Dec), NASA DDCSOL - USAFE - US Air Force (30 Dec)
• Technologies of the Year: Search engines, JAVA, Internet Phone
• Emerging Technologies: Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools, Internet appliance (Network Computer)