| Year | Event |
| 1961 | Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" is published May 31, 1961. |
| 1962 | Leonard Kleinrock releases his paper talking about packetization. |
| 1962 | Paul Baran suggests transmission of data using fixed size message blocks. |
| 1962 | J.C.R. Licklider becomes the first Director of IPTO and gives his vision of a galactic network. |
| 1964 | Baran publishes reports "On Distributed Communications." |
| 1964 | Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first book on packet nets entitled Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design. |
| 1965 | Lawrence G. Roberts with MIT performs the first long distant dial-up connection between a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts and Tom Marill with a Q-32 at SDC in California. |
| 1965 | Donald Davies coins the word "Packet." |
| 1966 | Lawrence G. Roberts and Tom Marill publish a paper about their earlier success at connecting over dial-up. |
| 1966 | Robert Taylor joins ARPA and brings Larry Roberts there to develop ARPANET. |
| 1967 | Donald Davies creates 1-node NPL packet net. |
| 1967 | Wes Clark suggests use of a minicomputer for network packet switch. |
| 1968 | Doug Englebart publicly demonstrates Hypertext on December 9, 1968. |
| 1968 | The first Network Working Group (NWG) meeting is held. |
| 1968 | Larry Roberts publishes ARPANET program plan on June 3, 1968. |
| 1968 | First RFP for a network goes out. |
| 1968 | UCLA is selected to be the first node on the Internet as we know it today and serve as the Network Msmnt Center. |
| 1969 | Steve Crocker releases RFC #1 on April 7, 1979 introducing the Host-to-Host and talking about the IMP software. |
| 1969 | UCLA puts out a press release introducing the public to the Internet on July 3, 1969. |
| 1969 | On August 29, 1969 the first network switch and the first piece of network equipment (called "IMP", which is short for Interface Message Processor) is sent to UCLA. |
| 1969 | On September 2, 1969 the first data moves from UCLA host to the IMP switch. |
| 1969 | CompuServe, the first commercial online service, is established. |
| 1970 | Steve Crocker and UCLA team releases NCP. |
| 1972 | Ray Tomlinson introduces network e-mail, the first messaging system to send messages across a network to other users. |
| 1972 | First public demo of ARPANET. |
| 1972 | Norm Abramson' Alohanet connected to ARPANET: packet radio nets. |
| 1973 | Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn design TCP during 1973 and later publish it with the help of Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December of 1974 in RFC 675. |
| 1973 | ARPA deploys SATNET the first international connection. |
| 1973 | Robert Metcalfe creates the Ethernet at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). |
| 1973 | The first VoIP call is made. |
| 1978 | TCP splits into TCP/IP driven by Danny Cohen, David Reed, and John Shoch to support real-time traffic. This allows the creation of UDP. |
| 1978 | John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC develop the first worm. |
| 1981 | BITNET is founded. |
| 1983 | ARPANET standardizes TCP/IP. |
| 1984 | Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel introduce DNS. |
| 1986 | Eric Thomas develops the first Listserv. |
| 1986 | NSFNET is created. |
| 1986 | BITNET II is created. |
| 1988 | First T-1 backbone is added to ARPANET. |
| 1988 | Bitnet and CSNET merge to create CREN. |
| 1990 | ARPANET replaced by NSFNET. |
| 1990 | The first search engine Archie, written by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Mike Parker at McGill University in Montreal Canada is released on September 10, 1990 |
| 1991 | Tim Berners-Lee introduces WWW to the public on August 6, 1991. |
| 1991 | NSF opens the Internet to commercial use. |
| 1992 | Internet Society formed. |
| 1992 | NSFNET upgraded to T-3 backbone. |
| 1993 | The NCSA releases the Mosaic browser. |
| 1995 | The dot-com boom starts. |
| 1995 | The first VoIP software (Vocaltec) is released allowing end users to make voice calls over the Internet. |
| 1996 | Telecom Act deregulates data networks. |
| 1996 | More e-mail is sent than postal mail in USA. |
| 1996 | CREN ended its support and since then the network has cease to exist. |
| 1997 | Internet2 consortium is established. |
| 1997 | IEEE releases 802.11 (WiFi) standard. |
| 1998 | Internet weblogs begin to appear. |
| 1999 | Napster starts sharing files in September of 1999. |
| 2000 | The dot-com bubble starts to burst. |
| 2003 | January 7, 2003 CREN's members decided to dissolve the organization. |