(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Internet is both a young pup and an old dog. Most people think the Net and the World Wide Web are synonymous. In fact the Web, just a decade old, is only the popular, commercial face of the Net--and hardly anyone had even heard of it until Marc Andreessen and pals invented the Mosaic browser in 1993. The Internet itself goes back to the early 1960s, when scientists designed an experimental network to let different sorts of computers communicate with one another. Little did they know that their creation would forever change the course of modern business and culture. Here is an abridged history of the tangled Net we wove.

--Mark Borden

1958 Ike is the original geek hero. He forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to coordinate all American technological research.

1961-64 The brain trust: J.C.R. Licklider, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence Roberts of MIT design a network that will let different sorts of computers speak with one another wherever they are. Turns out they'd just invented the Internet.

1964 Intel's Gordon Moore coins Moore's Law, which predicts that computing power will double every year. He later revises it to every two years.

No nukes: Paul Baran's Rand Corp. paper about the bomb-worthiness of distributed networks begets the legend that the Net was created to survive nuclear war. It wasn't. The idea for the Net already existed.

1969 The pipeline: Bolt Beranek & Newman builds the first Net backbone, and AT&T provides the wires, linking UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. (That's an actual sketch of it above.) The Ghost of Napster Future rattles its chains.

1971 Tech journalist Don Hoefler coins the term "Silicon Valley."

1972 What'll it be: &, *, or $? No, the @ sign wins as the locating symbol for e-mail addresses and for countless future Internet cafes.

1976 "Bring me my tea and crumpets?" "Off with his head?" Queen Elizabeth II sends the first royal e-mail.

1978 Chicago hobbyist Ward Christensen writes a software program called MODEM (for modulator-demodulator), leading to the first annoying high-pitched whine of the Internet era.

1979 Father of Webpap: Kevin MacKenzie of MsgGroup, the first Arpanet mailing list, introduces the emoticon. )-:

1981 It costs what? The Xerox Star 8010 is the first computer with a mouse and graphical user interface. Price tag: $16,000

1982 Intel introduces its 286. Within six years, 15 million computers will use the chip. Within 18 years, landfills everywhere overflow.

1984 William Gibson's Neuromancer introduces the term "cyberspace," giving millions another place to lose things.

1988 The Net gets sick for the first time when a self-replicating bug shuts it down.

1989 Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Geneva invents HTML and names his little networking project the World Wide Web.

1990 Birth of the ISP: The World becomes the first Internet dial-up service. It's still chugging away in Brookline, Mass.

1993 It's hip. It's cool. It's hard to read. Wired magazine is launched.

The Net for dummies: Marc Andreessen's browser, Mosaic, allows easy navigation of the World Wide Web.

1994 Junk food: An Arizona law firm we don't want to publicize brings spam to the Net.

1995 Bye-bye, buying-by-the-minute: Earthlink offers the first all-you-can-eat Internet service for $19.95.

Netscape's huge IPO--then the third largest in Nasdaq history--gives Bill Gates something else to destroy.

Amazon sells its first book.

1997 Log on, drink poison, drop dead: Heaven's Gate cult commits mass suicide. The cult's Website and its members' involvement in Web design boost the Net's popularity with alienated teens.

1998 The garage sale goes online: eBay's stock soars 163% on its first day of trading.

1998 Old job, new job: Steve Jobs, back at Apple, debuts the iMac--sans floppy drive. It will define the future of PCs and the Web (and spur sales of stand-alone disk drives).

1999 It costs what? Two companies offer free computers to anyone who signs a long-term contract for Internet service.

Fashion victims: Some 1.5 million people (read "men") try to witness online soft-porn fashion show for lingerie manufacturer Victoria's Secret. Hello, gridlock.

2000 Napster launches: Students proceed to suck up every available ounce of bandwidth.

Do grown men hugging portend kinder, gentler corporate executives? AOL agrees to buy Time Warner for $165 billion, swapping cybercash for good old-fashioned debt.