Ancient Web: Hobbes' Internet Timeline Watched the Network Grow Since 1993

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Few websites are better qualified to chronicle the early Internet than one that began keeping its own Internet chronology while the Web was still young.

Visit Hobbes' Internet Timeline.

Robert H. Zakon's timeline carries a copyright range of 1993–2018 and identifies its current edition as version 25. It is a year-by-year reference rather than a narrative history. The entry for 1969 describes the first ARPANET nodes at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and Utah; other entries follow networking protocols, mail, domain registration, worms, international connections and the arrival of commercial Internet services.

The page is long, densely linked and unusually transparent about how its facts were assembled. At the bottom, Zakon lists sources and acknowledges contributors.

The timeline itself became part of Internet history

A major milestone is preserved outside the page: the RFC Editor published an edition as RFC 2235 in November 1997. That formal record identifies Zakon as the author and categorizes the document as informational rather than a technical standard. It corroborates that the chronology was already established while these events were still fairly recent.

The growth tables give the chronology an almost physical sense of scale. The first ARPANET entries describe four hosts in late 1969. Later tabulations track hundreds of thousands of hosts, rising domain counts and the expanding volume of Usenet traffic. The website also includes early Internet security statistics with separate categories for incidents, advisories and vulnerabilities.

The older dates are not presented as if every technical question has been definitively settled. The entries use source initials and citations, and some assertions reflect the state of scholarship at the time of compilation. Readers can follow those references rather than treating a single timeline as an infallible authority.

Its FAQ is revealing, too. Zakon insists that his own address is the authorized home for the document and provides terms for reuse. In an era when copied text circulated without provenance, he wanted the living reference to retain a traceable source.

The page closes with bibliographic information, acknowledgements and revision metadata—the sort of material that disappears when a reference is reduced to a search snippet.

Hobbes' Internet Timeline documents a network growing into a global medium. It also records one independent author's determination to keep updating the explanation as the network changed around him.

Explore the timeline and its historical statistics.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.