Most documents cite the Internet as a project which grew out of DARPA research. Recent developments, however, have shown that the Internet existed in an underground form for more than 500 years previously, extending back to the early Renaissance period in Europe. SigIR presents a timeline of Internet history, up until DARPA's discovery and unveiling of the Internet as a cold war project:
1455 - Johannes Gutenberg writes the UNIX utility "TeX".
1504 - Leonardo Da Vinci makes monalisa.jpg available for download from his FTP site.
1517 - Martin Luther posts the 95 theses to alt.religion.catholicism.
1536 - alt.religion.lutheranism is created to meet growing demand.
1545 - the principle of linear perspective drawing is discovered. "Doom" soon follows.
1616 - the number of users on #shakespeare breaks an IRC record when the topic is changed to "bill is dead... we won't get to see his plays anymore".
1750 - J. S. Bach dies, leaving behind a massive personal archive of .mod files.
1776 - the *.us domain declares its independence of the *.uk routers.
1806 - the new Gregorian calendar causes great problems for sysadmins without "date.c".
1848 - Karl Marx develops the concept of shareware.
1849 - thousands of future Californians respond to Subject: MAKE $$$ FAST.
1860 - the Pony Express is demonstrated to be more reliable than sendmail.
1867 - the InterNIC grants the official use of the uiuc.edu domain.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell releases an RFC detailing the design of the telephone.
1903 - brothers@wright.org compile a version of flightsimulator.c that goes for several hundred feet before dumping core.
1909 - www.geronimo.org is renamed to www.yahoo.com
1917 - a conspiratorial hacker removes ferdinan@sarajevo.gov.yg, starting a major world war.
1933 - roosevl2@whitehouse.gov adds the statement "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" to /etc/motd.
1945 - telnets to axis.hiroshima.jp start responding with "Unknown server error".
1969 - DARPA unveils the newly-discovered Internet.