Monday, February 7, 2011

The dancing baby

The dancing baby becomes one of the web's first fads in 1998. The dancing baby is a short 3D animation of a small baby wearing diapers and dancing. It is first created by Michael Girard and later tweaked by Ron Lussier at LucasArts. Lussier releases the dancing baby on a CompuServe forum and it is quickly passed along the Internet via email and other bulletin board systems.
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Sunday, February 6, 2011

World's smallest web server

Stanford Professor Vaughan Pratt creates the world's smallest web server in February 1999. Using off-the-shelf components, Pratt squeezes the hardware and software needed to operate a website into a package about the size of a box of matches. Pratt puts the tiny server online and news spreads rapidly. In the following five days, the little web server gets 78,000 hits.
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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Netscape Navigator

The Netscape Navigator browser is officially retired by AOL in February 2008. The prolific web browser helped launch the commercial Internet and was used by most people seeing the World-Wide-Web for the first time during the mid-1990s. Navigator was the leading web browser when AOL acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion.
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Friday, February 4, 2011

Mitnick hack

Kevin Mitnick is arrested in February 1995 on a twenty-five-count indictment that includes illegal possession of computer files stolen from such companies as Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Over a two and a half year period, Mitnick hacks into computers, steals corporate secrets, scrambles phone networks, and breaks into the National Defense Warning System, causing millions of dollars in losses.
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Thursday, February 3, 2011

MapQuest.com

The first consumer-focused interactive mapping website is launched at MapQuest.com in February 1996. With innovative technology and the first-of-its-kind consumer website, MapQuest.com captures the attention of the Internet consumer and business market. The company originated thirty years earlier as a cartographic services division producing free road maps given to gas station customers.
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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

IIS

Microsoft's web server product Internet Information Server is released as IIS 1.0 in February 1996. Attempting to catch up to Sun and NCSA, the product is built and tested using Microsoft's own websites. It supports the three current Internet protocols, HTTP, FTP, and Gopher, and includes support for CGI, Perl, and ISAPI programming interfaces.
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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Mosaic web browser

The first version of the Mosaic web browser is released in February 1993. Mosaic provides support for graphics, sound, and video clips. In addition, it introduces web forms, enabling many powerful new browser applications. Mosaic quickly becomes the most popular web browser and helps accelerate the growth of the web in 1993.
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