1974: INTERNET
[Overview]
When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the internet was not even born. On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still 20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. The internet was born in 1974 with the creation of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in 1983. It got a boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and of the first browser in 1993. At the end of 1997, there were 90 to 100 million users, with one million new users every month. At the end of 2000, there were over 300 million users.