As ever more computers were being connected to ARPANET, there arose a need for a list of all IP addresses. Jon Postel, one of the three creators of the TCP/IP protocol, began recording these numbers on his own computer. This marked the beginning of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), initially a U.S.-based agency that now operates globally, assigning IP addresses and later domain names. In 1998, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was established to continue this task.
The Birth of the Domain Name System (DNS)
There was a need to match technical numbers with simpler, more memorable names — essentially a kind of telephone directory. In 1983, the Domain Name System (DNS) was created. Engineer Paul Mockapetris developed the software using a hierarchical structure, like a tree, to quickly locate the IP address associated with a domain. Domain names were introduced, such as "thedigitalwine.com", consisting of a name, thedigitalwine, and a top-level domain (TLD), .com. Others TLD are .gov, .org, .net, and so on. Country-specific TLDs like .it, .us, .fr are known as ccTLDs (country code top-level domains).
The first Italian domain was "cnr.it", registered in 1987. Italy was one of the first European countries to adopt the IP protocol. The CNUCE Institute(National University Center of Electronic Calculus), had been involved in the ARPANET project since the early 1980s. Jon Postel assigned management of Italy's domain registry to the CNUCE group. The .it domain was the 19th ccTLD assigned worldwide.
By the mid-1980s, companies began registering their domains under .com, even though websites didn't exist yet. Registrations mainly served as placeholders, used to share product information in plain text. The first .com domain was "symbolics.com", registered by a Massachusetts-based computer company on March 15, 1985. Though the company no longer exists, the domain lives on, now owned by digital entrepreneur Aron Meystedt. Today, it hosts a 'museum' of Internet.
ARPANET was going to become obsolete and was shut down in 1990. However, on January 1, 1983, it had officially adopted TCP/IP as its communication protocol, marking the official beginning of the Internet era.
The Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)
BBSs was continuing to operate via telephone lines, and the FidoNet network connected nearly 400 BBSs across the U.S. and Europe. BBS technology was soon outdated compared to TCP/IP but, despite this, BBSs laid the philosophical groundwork for an open network.
Email was created in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson, who introduced the use of the "@" symbol to separate the username from the department name. With TCP/IP's implementation in 1983, email quickly spread. In 1979, newsgroups and the Usenet network were introduced, gaining popularity thanks to early internet providers.
America Online (AOL), former Control Video Corporation, provided dial-up services for Commodore 64 users. Rebranded as AOL in 1984, it began offering services for BBSs. As the Internet grew, AOL became the largest ISP in the U.S., enabling wider access to online services. With easier access to the Internet through ISPs and domains, users could more easily find services or information. Search engines wouldn't appear until after 1993, but domains were easier to remember than numeric IP addresses. This new system accelerated the growth of the Internet.
The Birth of the Web
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee was working on the foundations of the web: the HTTP protocol and HTML language. By 1990, the first website was online at CERN, a web page running on a NeXT computer from Steve Jobs' company. Berners-Lee also developed the first browser, named WorldWideWeb, which only worked on NeXT machines. Sites like symbolic.com, or bbn.com (registered on April 24, 1985) or xerox.com (January 9, 1986) were only a static page, you can read it but not navigate it. This, was the first website as we know them now:
In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created Mosaic, the first popular browser, later renamed Netscape Navigator. The browser wars began with Microsoft's Internet Explorer in 1995, which eventually overtook Netscape by the end of 1997.
Italy's first website was cnuce.cnr.it, developed by the same CNUCE group responsible for the first ARPANET connection nearly a decade earlier.
From the birth of the web, services and commercial products grew exponentially. In 1993, Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web's code public, allowing anyone to build on it. Webmail servers like Yahoo! Mail (1997) and Hotmail (1996) emerged, as did RSS feeds, messaging systems like ICQ, mIRC, MSN, and the first search engines — Yahoo (1994), AltaVista and Excite (1995), and finally Google in 1998.
Finding information wasn't easy 30 years ago, but thanks portals, Usenet, and patience, users could do it. Newsgroups and chats fostered discussions, sometimes heated. There were moderators and rules — violations led to bans. Online "flames" (hostile messages) were common. Despite anonymity, experienced users could often identify familiar individuals behind new nicknames by recognizing their tone. We learned to understand the mood of chats and distinguish jokes from serious insults simply 'reading the lips'.