Real, dated releases and announcements — verified against official sources, not speculation.
Tim Berners-Lee's first website had already been running quietly at CERN since December 1990. In August 1991, he posted a public invitation to collaborate — the moment the web actually became something the wider world could join.
Shawn Fanning's peer-to-peer file-sharing tool went live in June 1999, launched out of a small Hull, Massachusetts office. Within two years it would be shut down by court order — but not before changing the music industry permanently.
A Cornell graduate student's self-replicating program, released from MIT's network on a November night in 1988, spread far faster and further than its own author reportedly intended.
A Stanford research project on ranking web pages by their link structure became a legally registered company on a single day in September 1998 — the formal starting point for what would become the dominant search engine.
Priced at $1,565 with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive, the IBM 5150 didn't look like a revolution on paper. Its open architecture is what made it one anyway.
Less than three years after its landmark IPO, Netscape agreed to be acquired by AOL in an all-stock deal — a merger meant to counter Microsoft that critics immediately doubted, given the two companies' very different cultures.
Facing a losing battle against Internet Explorer, Netscape made an unprecedented move for a major commercial software company: giving away the source code to its flagship product, and creating Mozilla to steward it.
A company with no profit went public at $28 a share and closed its first day at $58.25, more than doubling in value in hours. Many historians point to this single afternoon as the moment internet mania actually began.
The first beta release of Haiku R1 arrived on September 28, 2018 — a milestone that had been anticipated for years, marking the project's transition from alpha-quality software toward an eventual stable 1.0.
Dolphin was days from launching on Steam when Nintendo sent Valve a DMCA cease-and-desist. Valve pulled the listing rather than take a side — and Dolphin's Steam release has been in limbo ever since.