Internet history has a few genuinely famous firsts. But plenty of foundational moments happened quietly, logged by almost nobody at the time, and only got recognized as significant well after the fact. Here are ten worth knowing.
1. The first networked email (1971)
Engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first message across a computer network — not just between users on the same machine — in late 1971, while working at BBN on early ARPANET technology. He also picked the @ symbol to separate username from host, a choice every email address on Earth still uses today.
2. The first banner ad (1994)
On October 27, 1994, the website HotWired ran an ad for AT&T with the text "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?" pointing to the words "YOU WILL." It's widely credited as the first web banner ad, and it reportedly pulled a click-through rate — around 44% of viewers clicked it — that would be unthinkable by today's standards.
3. The first webcam (1991)
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pointed a grayscale camera at a coffee pot in a room called the Trojan Room so colleagues could check whether it was full before making the trip. It connected to the wider web in 1993 and became an unlikely global curiosity for years afterward.
4. The first .com domain (1985)
Symbolics.com, registered by a Massachusetts computer maker on March 15, 1985, is the oldest .com domain still active today — registered years before "the internet" meant anything to most of the public.
5. The first item sold on eBay (1995)
Before eBay was even called eBay — the site launched as AuctionWeb — founder Pierre Omidyar listed a broken laser pointer, mostly just to test whether the auction system worked. It sold for $14.83 to a Canadian buyer who was, by his own account, actively looking for a broken one to fix.
6. The first secure online purchase (1994)
On August 11, 1994, a small online store called NetMarket processed the sale of a Sting CD, encrypting the buyer's credit card information in transit — the first transaction of its kind, proving online commerce could be done securely.
7. The first tweet (2006)
Jack Dorsey's March 21, 2006 post — "just setting up my twttr" — used the platform's early, vowel-dropped working name and wasn't meant to be remembered. It's now one of the most referenced individual posts in internet history.
8. The first spam email (1978)
A DEC marketer named Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited product announcement to several hundred ARPANET users in May 1978 — well over a decade before the word "spam" was ever applied to unwanted email.
9. The first webring software (1994)
Developer Sage Weil wrote the first widely used script for automatically linking topic-based websites into navigable rings in May 1994, laying the groundwork for a company, and a whole navigation format, that briefly became a core way people found niche websites.
10. The first widely used emoticon (1982)
Before emoji, there was :-). Computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed the sideways smiley in a 1982 message to a Carnegie Mellon University computer science bulletin board, suggesting it as a way to mark jokes in text-only messages so they wouldn't be misread as serious — a problem that, it turns out, never really went away.