The 50 most significant moments of Internet history

By Nate Lanxon on 25 September 2008, 4:02pm

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With the foundations of the Web in place, it was time to build the house itself. Our five selections underly certain developments that contributed to the crafting of the modern Web.

In 1992, long before Firefox and Internet Explorer, there were a few browsers knocking about, including Erwise, Viola and Arena. But the first Web browser to really take off was called Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, a student at Illinois University, it ignited the explosive growth of the WWW and interest in Web sites and was eventually ported to the Macintosh OS by Aleks Totic, a Yugoslav. The 1.0 release was made available in April 1993.

After the success of Mosaic, Andreessen founded Netscape, in April 1994. It then released in beta the follow-up to Mosaic -- a browser called Mozilla, later released as Netscape Navigator in December. But before that, in October, Andreesson set his company to work on making sure sensitive data transmitted over the Web was encrypted for security. The answer was SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, and it's still the industry standard in use today.

Half of the Web sites in existence use servers running Apache. It's completely free, open-source HTTP server software, responsible for dishing out Web pages, and succeeded the HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool in the 90s. Apache fuelled an explosive growth of the Web, and up until around 2000, even Microsoft's Hotmail ran on Apache.

Macromedia Flash started out life around 1995 as pen-and-tablet computer drawing software SmartSketch, developed by FutureWave Software. Its name eventually changed to FutureSplash Animator and was then sold, in December 1996, as animation software to Macromedia, and became Macromedia Flash 1.0. Now owned by Adobe, Flash is installed on over 95 per cent of the world's PCs, mainly to let people waste time at work.

RSS feeds are based on the XML language and let users subscribe to a Web site's content using an RSS feed reader. They first surfaced as the scriptingNews format, developed by Dave Winer in 1997. In 1999, Netscape developed RSS 0.90 -- a similar XML-based format, but Netscape abandoned the development of the format around the turn of the Millennium. Not only did RSS lead to the accessibility of blogs, but podcasting is by definition reliant on RSS.