Development of
the Internet worldwide

SWITCH making
Swiss Internet history

The 1950s and 1960s

In October 1957, the first artificial satellite the world has ever seen orbits the Earth, and the "sputnik shock" sends a shudder through North America.
In order to get the USA into a position of international leadership in science and technology, ARPA, the "Advanced Research Projects Agency" (subsequently renamed DARPA) is founded one year later. Its mission: promoting research in the US.
Three years after that, the US military has the first ever interconnected computer centre available to them.

1962 The US air force commissions a group of US researchers around Leonard Kleinrock to start development work on an "Advanced Research Projects Agency Network", or Arpanet for short. It is to be an extensive data network, allowing US scientists and the military to communicate and have shared access to computers, databases and storage.

1964 Doug Engelbart invents the mouse.

Small but beautiful: the prototype of the first computer mouse.

Source: SRI International

1969 Birth of the "Arpanet", precursor of today's Internet: It is the first network worldwide for exchanging data packets and components of the primeval Internet.
The Arpanet is composed of four interlinked computers between three US universities and the "Stanford Research Institute" on the west coast). Connections between them are established by telephone line. Content of the first message transmitted from one computer to another: "login". Unfortunately, only the "l" and the "o" get through to their destination before the system collapses. The next attempt an hour later, however, succeeds.

1950-55 Upon the initiative of the Swiss mathematics professor, Eduard Stiefel, the ETH Zurich leases the legendary Z4 computing machine from the German engineer and "father of the personal computer", Konrad Zuse.
Thus, the ETH Zurich temporarily has the only functioning computer in Europe available to it.

Fifty years later, the only surviving Z4 is to be found in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Source: Clemens Pfeiffer

1957 After construction work lasting approximately three and a half years, the first programmable computer "made in Switzerland" is commissioned in Eduard Stiefel's institute. It is known as the "Elektronische Rechenmaschine ETH", or ERMETH for short.

The "monster" is three metres high and has more than 17 000 vacuum tubes, 7000 diodes, 200 relays and a working memory weighing nearly 1.5 tonnes.

Public-transport users in Zurich, however, were less than enthusiastic about the ERMETH. When the computer is running, it uses up so much electric current that there is not always enough left for the trams operating the morning rush-hour service!

The 1970s and 1980s

1970 The Arpanet get as far as the eastern coast of the USA. Five years later, the US Pentagon officially launches it as an experimental scientific network. The first country outside the USA to be connected to it is Norway – by means of a satellite link in 1977.

1971 Ray Tomlinson invents the "e-mail" as well as the first program for sending e-mails, the "CYPNET Protocol".
As separators for e-mail addresses, he "resuscitated" the commercial "at" sign – the @ symbol. Asked at a later date what he has written in the first-ever e-mail, Tomlinson only remembers vaguely it must have been "something like QWERTYUIOP."

1979 Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin develop Usenet, the first free alternative to the Arpanet. It is comprised of two Unix computers exchanging data by means of a telephone line and is soon to grow into a worldwide "blackboard" with innumerable newsgroups.

• The Internet as a global system of interlinked networks begins to take shape.

The main contributory factors in the early 1980s are the multi-user operating system Unix and the C programming language. In 1981, precisely 213 computers around the world are "tied together". Two years later the number has grown to around 400.

1983 First major project success for the US ARPA authority: the "Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol", or TCP/IP for short, as the standard protocol in the Arpanet. It is available for use free-of-charge and makes it possible for different computers to communicate with one another.

Leap forward in time → TCP/IP in Switzerland

• Swiss IT pioneers put their brains into overdrive in the search for a data network that would connect all Swiss universities and researchers with one another. The answer they come up with: the "Telematikprojekt SWITCH".

1984 - 1985

1984 The "Domain Name System" which administers the name space in the Internet is introduced throughout the world!
It works a bit like a telephone directory and ensures that each server or the services within a network can be correctly addressed. It does that by assigning device names to the correct IP addresses and assigning these in turn to the correct domain names – in the case of www.switch.ch, for instance 130.59.108.36.

• Halfway through the 1980s, the US universities succeed in coupling their academic network to the Arpanet. For the first time, they have a very powerful data link available to them.

• "nordu.net", the world's first domain, is registered on 1 January 1985. It links all the Nordic countries with one another.

→ The first seven "top-level domains" are .com, .edu, .org, .gov, .int, .net and .mil, followed by the country code top-level domains.

→ The first commercial ".com" domain name, symbolics.com, is registered in March by an IT company from Massachusetts.

• Members of the informatics working party set up by CRUS (the "Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities") develop the idea of a national research network for Switzerland.

• Nearly every university has a connection to one or the other international data network. The vision of those who create SWITCH is to build up a single academic network in Switzerland and to make joint use of technological standards or communication pathways. Nationally to begin with, internationally later on.

1986

• Two years after the Sunday Times of London foresaw "the mouse coming out of its hole", Logitech (a spinoff of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) presents its "LogiMouse C7", the first popular three-button ball mouse at an affordable price. Instead of taking 20 hours, it thus becomes possible to learn how to operate a personal computer in barely 20 minutes. 

• From 1986 onwards, numerous networks with technical differences come into being around the world. The problem is that they are not compatible, i.e. they are not able to communicate with one another. The first solution to be developed is the Internet backbone NSFNET, the "National Science Foundation Network", connecting all researchers in the USA. Later on, all the academic networks in the USA are connected to it.

• The Swiss national parliament adopts a targeted support programme envisaging, amongst other measures, a financial allocation for building up tele-deveoinformatics services for teaching and research. That is the first step in the process that is to lead to the creation of a "Swiss Tele Communication System for Higher Education", SWITCH for short.

Source: Parlamentsdienste 3003 Bern

1987

• "Well, which computer shall I buy then?"
That is a question that no one yet really askes back in 1987. Apple's Macintosh II and Macintosh SE conquer the market. Both are based on an intuitive database program, whose linkages are later to act as a model for other developments, including the World Wide Web.

The Apple Macintosh SE – not yet as aesthetic as later models would be.

• The total number of networks in the Arpanet is growing rapidly: within a year from 2000 to some 27 000.

• The ".ch" top-level domain is born in Switzerland.
Its "father" is a professor at the ETH, Dr. Bernhard Plattner. On 20 May 1987, he applies to the competent organisation, the "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" (IANA) to have the ".ch" domain entered in the "Domain Name System".

Shortly after that, Bernhard Plattner becomes the general manager of SWITCH ad interim measure and transfers ".ch" to the Foundation. Since then, SWITCH has not only has the remit of building up the Swiss university and research network but also the responsibility of administering the ".ch" domain.

• Urs Eppenberger starts working at SWITCH – even before the official setting up of the Foundation.

Some 25 years later, he is asked about his recollections of that start-up phase and how the Internet came to Switzerland (interview available in German):

Radio DRS3, interview with "Internet Man" Urs Eppenberger, April 2012

• SWITCH comes into being!

On 22 October, representatives of the Swiss Confederation and the eight cantons with universities, Basel-Stadt, Berne, Fribourg, Geneva, Neuchatel, St. Gallen, Vaud and Zurich sign the deed creating "SWITCH – Teleinformatic Services for Teaching and Research".

Its mission: to build up and operate a national computer network for teaching and research in Switzerland.

1988

• France and the Nordic countries set up their first permanent links with the Internet. The worldwide network now counts some 80 000 computers, which are used predominantly for scientific purposes. The trouble is the existence of umpteen different computer systems, software products and word-processing programs, making Internet communication amongst researchers around the world difficult.

• Internet freaks are in for their first psychological shock when the first malicious program appears in the Internet, the Morris worm: It exploits weak passwords and other shortcomings to nibble its way through some 60 000 computers, totally disabling some of them and causing damage totalling an estimated USD 10 million. The worm's student author, Robert Lappan Morris, claims that all he wanted is to find out about the actual size of the Internet by then.
Nevertheless, the affair has a positive spinoff: the creation of the first "CERT Coordination Center" in the USA, as a worldwide contact point for coordinating responses to network attacks. This is followed by the creation of national CERTs as "Computer Emergency Response Teams". In the case of Switzerland, this role is assumed by SWITCH-CERT in 1996.

Leap forward in time → SWITCH-CERT is founded

• There are already 2 Mbit/s links between the two Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich as well as the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen. Clearly still scope for expansion! A mere seven years later, the networking of the Swiss universities is already looking very different:

• In April, SWITCH opened its first office in Berne.
Thomas Brunner, who up until then has been responsible for the entire data communication at the ETH in Zurich, becomes deputy director of SWITCH.

With his unfaltering feeling for innovation and his decisive expertise, he makes sure that in the following decades Switzerland sets an example for the rest of Europe.

 • Hurry up! The Swiss universities has two pressing problems and SWITCH set out to solve them:

Problem 1: How shall I say it?
The Swiss universities used not to have a common denominator for communicating with one another. The solution is called SWITCHlan. This established a multi-protocol network functioning like a "local area network" in first of all connecting all the computers inside a university with one another and then from one university to another. It begins by connecting up all Swiss universities, all researchers, and then all Internet users in Switzerland. In that way, in the years that followed, SWITCHlan makes Switzerland as a research location into a pioneer on a European scale.

Problem 2: the national ring fence
The Internet is still just an e-mail exchange network between universities and researchers. SWITCHmail is destined to change that and, apart from other developments, is to make international Internet communication possible for Swiss universities.

1989

• Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, working at CERN, launch a project about how to build up a "World Wide Web". What they are looking for is a solution to exchange data with people working for CERN outside of Switzerland. Their approach involves putting together a "web" comprised of three freely available components:

1. HTTP, "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol"
   
2. HTML, "Hyper Text Markup Language"
3. URLs, "Uniform Resource Locators"

Berners-Lee's "Next" computer in his office at CERN in Geneva. It is used as the world's first web server. Twenty-five years later, his former workplace has been recreated down to the last detail in the Museum of Communication in Berne.

Source: CERN

It is HTML as the common language standard in particular, that makes the Internet compatible for mass use.
Using HTML, it is possible to exchange texts, including research data and images. In that way, Tim Berners-Lee revolutionises access options to the web, which up until then has been text-based.
At the same time, personal computers become affordable for the population at large in the USA, Europe and Japan. Only thing that is still missing for a breakthrough of the World Wide Web: a user-friendly browser.

Leap forward in time → Browser

• TCP/IP, the protocol used in the Internet today, becomes dominant throughout the academic community in Switzerland. That happened despite the fact that neither the large mainframes at the universities nor the researchers' personal computers are capable of running TCP/IP. The solution: install additional software for running the Internet connections.

→ By the end of 1989, all the Swiss universities and CERN in Geneva are connected to the Internet via SWITCH at either 64 or 128 Kbit/s.

• The first services, SWITCHmail and SWITCHlan, are officially brought into service. SWITCH also set up "mirror" servers giving Swiss universities fast access for the first time ever to copies of much-demanded international data archives.

• With six employees, SWITCH moves into its first office premises – the ETH Centre at 'am Haldeneggsteig' in Zurich. The registered office of the Foundation remains in Berne.

SWITCH's first half dozen (from left to right): Peter Gilli, Thomas Lenggenhager, Simon Poole, Franziska Remund, Urs Eppenberger and Thomas Brunner.

1990

• Apple's latest coup is the Macintosh Classic in a "washing-machine design". Its popularity, particularly among students and lecturers, is due to the fact that it is relatively small and compact. 

Apples Macintosh Classic

Source: Alexander Schaelss

• Everything in the Internet still looks ASCII-coded until the invention of the first browser – in other words: there is white writing on a black background, generally in "Monochrome Courier".

• The Arpanet is finally closed down at the end of February. That inspires one of its joint developers, Vinton Cerf, to write the not-so-serious short poem
"Requiem of the Arpanet":

• The end of the Arpanet marks at the same time the beginning of the commercial phase of the Internet. The ban on advertising disappears, and Internet providers immediately begin to expand and promote the Internet. 

• The computer game Tetris, develop by the Russians, Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov, turns out to be the largest Russian computer export hit. For one year, it has already been available in the "Game Boy" hand-held version and thus achieves a breakthrough outside of the USSR too. Tetris is to become the world's all-time most successful computer game.

Leap forward in time → Tetrominos

• The "Hubble" space telescope is lifted into Earth orbit by the Space Shuttle. In the years that follow, it transmits perfectly focused photographs from space and plays its part in monumental astrophysical discoveries, including insights into the expanding universe.

Source: Nasa, STScI

• SWITCH becomes the official registry for the ".ch" top-level domain and also Switzerland's first "Internet Service Provider".

Since the Internet is, however, still in a deep sleep, the requests for domain names at first scarcely exceeded what could be counts on the fingers of one hand. Up until then, it is only the Swiss universities and a handful of big companies that has access to the Internet. The global rules for issuing domain names state that companies are allowed just one domain name each and that private individuals are allowed none.

→ In order to obtain a domain name, it is enough to send a completed application form to SWITCH by post, fax or e-mail.

→ The first ".ch" domain names:
1. cern.ch
2. switch.ch
3. ethz.ch
– followed by the names of all the universities.

• The first Swiss libraries and engineering colleges are connected up to the Internet through SWITCHlan. Anyone wanting to borrow a book is able to order it through the network – or to have it delivered even faster by fax.

• In Switzerland and other European countries a start is made on privatising the academic networks.

• A good 15% of all homes in Switzerland has a personal computer. Every day, SWITCH transmits up to 5000 e-mail messages through the SWITCHlan academic network.

1991

• Serious competition arrives for Microsoft & Co.: At the age of only 21, the Finnish student Linus Torvalds writes "Linux" as a Unix operating system. Through Usenet, he presents it to other developers – and meets with huge interest!
Linux has gone down in IT history as the very first free operating system and, 25 years later, is still being eagerly further develop and adapted to meet needs by software experts all around the world.

What sort of animal would Linux be if it was not an operating system? A penguin – having been decided on by the developers, Tux is the Linux mascot today and has just as many ardent supporters.

Source: Larry Ewing, Simon Budig, Anja Gerwinski

• "Give it a try" – those are the words of Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, when he makes the "World Wide Web" freely available on 6 August 1991. Berners-Lee's computer functions as the world's first webserver.
→ The world's first webpage explains in everyday language how to create a page of one's own or how to look for information in the World Wide Web.

• "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) is published by Phil Zimmermann. The program for encrypting and signing data is intended primarily to protect civil-rights activists from being spied on by state secret services. As freeware, it soon spread throughout the world via the Internet.

• SWITCH becomes leader of the COSINE-MHS project ("Cooperation for Open Systems Interconnection in Europe - Message Handling Service") and assumes immediate responsibility for the introduction of worldwide e-mail traffic between the academic networks.

• IANA enters SWITCH's DNS servers in the so-called "Root DNS".

• In just this one year, the SWITCHmail computers handles approximately a million electronic messages. TCP/IP is already being used to exchange larger software packets.

1992

• The expression "surfing the Internet" appears for the first time in a University of Minnesota Bulletin, authored by the US librarian, Jean Armour Poll. The inspiration for it has come from her mouse pad, which has a picture of a windsurfer on it.

• The worldwide discussion forum, Usenet ("User's Network"), with a large number of newsgroups is being used by around 12 million people. Via SWITCH's file servers, 40 organisations have access to 2000 subject areas like "sci.aeronautics", "alt.censorship" or "talk.environment". Anyone with anything to contribute or questions on a special topic is able to join in through a worldwide news system.

• In February, SWITCH, which by then has 13 employees, left the ETH building and moves into offices of its own on Limmatquai in Zürich. Later on, it adds offices a few metres away on Neumühlequai – along with a webcam, which is to become extremely popular with local residents.

Limmatquai, Zurich

Leap forward in time→
Popping the question by Webcam

• SWITCH makes it possible to send e-mails via Internet in Switzerland.

• The Swiss Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM/BAKOM) is set up in Bienne. As part of the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport and Telecommunications, the new authority assumes supervisory responsibility from then onwards for all wireless and telephone operations in Switzerland.
Its equivalents in other countries include the "Office of Communication" (Ofcom) in the United Kingdom, the German Federal Network Agency ("Bundesnetzagentur") and Austria's "Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH".

1993

• The students Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina together develop the first browser for Windows computers, called "Mosaic". The navigation program revolutionises the Internet, since it makes it possible for the first time to display text and photographs simultaneously. The browser is a huge success and makes the Internet attractive for the business world as well for the first time.

Screenshot "Mosaic" browser

• In Germany, "DENIC" is created as the registry for .de domains.

• Intel launches its first "Pentium P5" chip: a mass of technology packed into a few square millimetres. The Pentium makes it possible for the first time to run several applications simultaneously on a personal computer. It also provides particular support for graphics and music.
 

Source: Daniel Schwen

• The White House goes online. Bill Clinton secures a place in history as the first US president to be reachable by e-mail – at president@whitehouse.gov.

• SWITCH is entrusted
with the administration
of the ".li" top-level domain.

The total number of ".li" and ".ch" domain names registered reaches now 148.

• The volume of traffic over SWITCH's network exceeds 50 Gbyte/month.

1994

• Tim Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium, (3WC), which sets the non-proprietary standard for validated webpages. It later goes on to develop the HTML and CSS standards.

• Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen found "Mosaic Communications Corporation", subsequently renamed "Netscape Communications". Their free browser rapidly makes the use of the Internet popular. 

• In order to make the search for information more effective in the continuously growing Internet, David Filo and Jerry Yang, who are students at Stanford University, starts a collection of "good" web addresses. This results in a list, including search options, which they place in the Internet under the title of " "Yet another hierarchical officious oracle", or 'Yahoo' for short. It does not take long until more and more surfers are using the list and making additions to it. The two finally abandon their studies and go online with the legendary web directory "yahoo.com".

• What does it mean when the first online service for ordering pizzas is set up by the US "Pizza Hut" chain? When the world's first Internet bank, "First Virtual" opens its branch? These are clear signs that electronic business is slowly but surely taking shape. For the first time in history, the number of commercial Internet users overtakes the number of scientific ones – connected to some three million computers around the world.

• In Switzerland, the Internet has still not really woken up, and at the end of the year there are still no more than 300 ".ch" domain names registered. Most of these are academic organisations and large companies. There is still no provision at all for private individuals to become holders of domain names. From then on, however, it took only four years to reach the 100 000 mark!

• Thomas Brunner becomes Managing Director of SWITCH.

1995

• The dotcom boom (the explosive growth of the speculative bubble in the technology sector) begins in the western industrialised countries. New websites, especially "Start-ups" appear like mushrooms overnight. The stock exchanges are bombarded with an insatiable demand from investors in the expectation of huge profits. Internet, telecommunications and technology funds found ready takers on Nasdaq, the New Market, the Swiss Market Index and their equivalents elsewhere.

Leap forward in time → Boom!

• Sun Microsystems presents its open Internet and programming language, Java, while Netscape introduces its JavaScript, a script language especially for web browsers.

• The first censorship measures by CompuServe in Usenet: 200 allegedly objectionable groups are temporarily suspended.

• Microsoft launches its Windows 95, the first operating system with its own advertising campaign, including a song:
"Start me up", by the Rolling Stones.

Logo: John Pasche, 1971

• Halleluja. The Vatican goes online, offering www.vatican.va as a virtual contact point. In the same year, Alcoholics Anonymous does the same and opens an online advice bureau.

• Switzerland celebrates "5 years Internet in SWITCHerland"!

• Several cantonal administrations express the wish to be connected to SWITCH's network. There are even initial plans to increase the data throughput to as fast as 155 Mbit/s.

• SWITCH's file server grew to a good 18 gigabytes of data and has already established an international reputation for itself. Its accompanying database held information from 850 FTP servers and approximately nine million files.

• This SWITCH Journal cover proves conclusively: it is not only the Space Shuttle researchers in the USA but students and researchers in Switzerland too that want to reach for the stars!

1996

• On 8 February, the Internet is blacked out for the first time – as a generalised protest against the planned "Communication Decency Act". It is followed by the "blue ribbon campaign" as an expression of the struggle for freedom of speech in the Internet.

• The ICQ network comes into being, the first widespread instant-messaging service.

• The first version of Internet Explorer is distributed free-of-charge and is thus positioned as a product in direct competition with Netscape's "Navigator". It is the start of a ferocious "browser war" between the two market leaders.

• "BackRub", the precursor of the Google search engine, starts as a research project run by two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their declared aim is "facilitation of key technologies for a uniform, integrated and universal digital library". BackRub already makes implicit use of the "PageRank" mechanism, which establishes the popularity of links and displays search results according to relevance. Two years later, the project is presented to the public as the "Google" search engine.

• The "great grandfather" of the iPhone, the folding mobile phone with the melodious name of "Nokia Communicator 9000", is not only able to send SMSs, faxes and e-mails, but already has an HTML-enabled browser for surfing the Internet, which is still not even standard for personal computers! It also has a robust antenna that can be turned in any direction – and its reception is correspondingly impressive.

• In July, Dolly, the first cloned sheep, is born in Edinburgh.

Source: Toni Barros

Its genes have been taken from the cell nucleus of an adult animal. After its death six-and-a-half years later, it is stuffed and put on display in the Royal Museum of Scotland.

• The modem manufacturer, U.S.Robotics, starts sales of a palmtop computer called "Palm-Pilot", which is to develop into a money-spinner.

Source: R Channel

• For the first time, a computer defeats a human: IBM's "Deep Blue" beats the reigning world chess champion, Gerry Kasparov, in one out of three games and a year later wins a whole tournament.

• A step at a time, the Swiss academic network (like others) is evolving from being a multi-protocol network, capable of processing several network-protocol worlds, into a pure Internet-protocol network (1998).

• The "CH/LI DOM-REG" website goes online. From now on, anyone wanting to have a ".li" or ".ch" domain name can apply for it using an online form. At the end of 1996, 13 450 domain names are registered.

Don't get a shock! Here's what www.nic.ch, the first website of the Swiss registry, looks like in 1996. Shortly afterwards, other registries around the world are admittedly nicer coloured, but are also not perfect yet:

• The first Internet cafes in the German-speaking part of Switzerland entices clients to indulge in collective surfing. An hour costs about CHF 15. It is also possible for the first time to participate in the "Swiss World Internet Surfing Championship".

 

• There is a price to pay for the Internet boom. The Internet becomes attractive for cyber criminals too. As a preventive measure, SWITCH creates SWITCH-CERT, the national "Computer Emergency Response Team".

• Swiss television sets up a novel homepage offering information about its programmes.

1997

• EuroCERT starts its work as the European security coordination body.

• For the first time, Queen Elizabeth's Christmas speech is being broadcasted not only by radio and television but by Internet, too.
 

• The first digital MP3 player makes its way onto the shop shelves. It is called "Listen up" and is launch by "Audio Highway".

SWITCH sends out invitations to its 10th anniversary celebrations!

• All the national research networks in Europe are by now connected to a common backbone. SWITCH decides to concentrate its network business on the academic sector and to discontinue its network service with private industry, by transferring all "commercial" customers to Swisscom.

• SWITCH's webservers are now answering a daily average of 41 600 requests, and there are some 1500 visits to the homepage each day. The overview page of Swiss libraries turns out to be particularly popular and it alone has 240 visitors a day.


• Credit Suisse is the first bank in Switzerland to introduce Internet banking, which it brands as "Direct Net".

• The first spam avalanches hit the Newsnet which SWITCH makes available to all users in Switzerland.

1998

Google goes online!

• On 1 September, the American, Larry Page, and the Russian, Sergey Brin presents their BackRub search engine under its new name. Their mission statement: "to organise the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful".

• One precondition for the Internet to function properly is for particular names and addresses, such as the ".ch" and ".li" top-level domains, to be assigned only once in the whole world. The body newly set up to take charge of that is a US foundation called the "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers", or ICANN for short.

• Apple unveiles its first "iMac Bondy Blue". The design computer catapults the crisis-ridden company back into top position among manufacturers of personal computers. It takes less than a year for the all-in-one device to refill Apple's empty coffers.

• The Starr Report investigating the Lewinsky-Clinton affair is published in the Internet. It is the first time that a government grants its citizens access to an official document solely through the Internet.

• The first rewritable DVD appears on the market.

• Switzerland's academic network is subjected to excessive use by students, lecturers and researchers. They generate 98% more data traffic than the year before. It is high time for SWITCH's network experts to start thinking about the feasibility of implementing larger bandwidths.

→ With the signing of the contract between Ascom, DiAx and SWITCH, the starting signal is given for the massive expansion of the connection capacities of the individual university locations on SWITCHlan. 

• By now, one person in four living in Switzerland has a mobile phone, only one in ten is a regular Internet user, and personal computers are to be found in roughly half the country's homes. SWITCH counts roughly 95 000 registered ".ch" and ".li" domain names.

1999

• The Internet and mobile telephony has become affordable mass products. The IT sector continues to experience a boom throughout the world. Nasdaq, the New Market and other securities exchanges rose to new record heights.

• The millennium problem ("Y2K") kindles fears of the end of the world, and billions are spent worldwide to stop it from happening. The collapses that are feared do not, however, materialise.


• It could have been really marvellous! The Japanese Sony group presents the first generation of the self-programmable domestic robot, "Aibo" (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) for a unit price of around 2500 euros. Ten years later and with around 150 000 models sold, "Aibo" is no more than history, and doing the domestic chores is still a matter for human beings, apart from chip-controlled vacuum cleaners and lawn-mowers.

• The headcount in SWITCH's Zurich office has grown to 28, and there are sometimes surprising scenes for anyone looking out of the window:

An original way to pop the question: A Zurich man asks the love of his life to marry him via the SWITCH webcam. Reportedly, the lady said "yes".

• Since October, SWITCH provides the Swiss universities with a fast, 40 Mbit/s data link to the European research network and to all universities in the USA. With the entry into service of the latest generation of the SWITCHlan network, it becomes possible for Swiss universities to experiment for the first time with multimedia transmissions between lecture theatres. By international comparison, they thus take a big step forward as regards computer network infrastructure.

2000

• The "BOOM" this time is more the noise of a crash. After the breath-taking expansion of the IT sector, the first hi-tech companies begin announcing insolvencies instead of the high profits expected. Prices plummet, causing panic sales, especially by small investors. In March 2000, the worldwide crash of the securities exchanges happens along with mass bankruptcies.

The historic perspective of the dotcom Internet bubble can be clearly seen from the share-price trends on Nasdaq, the largest technological exchange in the USA.

After a long period of growth and buoyant demand for specialists, the IT sector ran into its first crisis, which lasts until 2005.

• Damage running into milliards is caused by the "ILOVEYOU" worm. Setting out from the Philippines in May, it spreads like wildfire through the Internet by infecting Microsoft's mail program, "Outlook". On the first day alone, some 47 million people around the world find the dangerous "love letter" in their in-trays, and 1.9 million open it. "ILOVEYOU" causes train cancellations, the collapse of electronic funds transfers and the paralysis of numerous company networks. 

• Google starts selling advertisements in combination with certain search terms and launches "Google AdWords". The model turns out to be so successful that, in the years that follow, Google has sufficient financial resources to be able to fund all sorts of additional services.

• All the Swiss universities of applied sciences are connected up to the SWITCHlan education and research network. SWITCH takes two key decisions for Switzerland as a knowledge location:

1) The purchase its own fibre-optic lines. Why? To be able to offer the universities more favourable Internet tariffs in the medium term. The purchase of the first fibre-optic pair between Geneva and Zurich marks the contractual fulfilment of the 2000 decision.

2) The data link between Zurich and Geneva is the most heavily trafficked one in the academic network. SWITCH decides to upgrade this route from 155 Mbit/s to 2.5 Gigabit/s thus venturing into the high-speed zone for the first time. 

• One third of the Swiss population is regularly in the Internet, 57% of small and medium-sized businesses have their own homepages. The demand for ".ch" and ".li" domain names grows rapidly, reaching 353 300 by the end of the year. Whereas
SWITCH's own growth is not quite as fast, going up to 34 employees.

• Dr. Andreas Dudler, head of computer services at the ETH Zurich, is elected president of the foundation Board.

• Swiss mobile-telephony providers introduced WAP services, making mobile phones into Internet surfing stations.

• Work begins on building up the Swiss Virtual Campus. The aim is to create virtual mobility for all students in Switzerland through the targeted promotion of new communication and information services.

2001

Wikipedia goes online!

• The free online encyclopaedia opens its virtual doors on 15 January. By the end of the year, the number of articles on the open-source platform has grown to some 20 000 in 18 languages.

• For the first time, a human nervous system is successfully connected to a computer.

• The former illegal music exchange, Napster, is switched off. If the first music download exchanges had never existed, the legal models that follow them, such as iTunes and listening via Internet would not be what they are today.

• The supervisory responsibilities of OFCOM are extended to the issue of domain names. That provides SWITCH with the legal basis for its registry activity, and it is confirmed as the sole registry for ".ch".

• The glassy 2.5-Gbit/s data super-highway for the universities commences operations in October. It is laid along the motorway axis Geneva-Lausanne-Berne-Basel-Zurich, and SWITCHlan interconnects CERN, Lausanne University, Berne University, Basel University and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The new line is capable of...

→ ...transmitting a volume of data equivalent to the entire contents of a CD-ROM in two seconds.

→ ...transmitting live music for 2100 people who listen simultaneously on the Internet.

Positioning and maintaining the fibre-optic cables for SWITCHlan involves a greater outlay than might be believed. A true network fan, however, will not forgo the opportunity of watching it all happen at first hand.

This link constitutes the first step in implementing the SWITCHlambda project, whose aim is to establish a dedicated fibre-optic network throughout Switzerland, integrating all the conventional universities and the universities of applied science.

2002

• The very first iPod that Apple unveils to the world incorporates no less than a 5 GB hard disk. Even with the first iPod generation, CEO Steve Jobs indulges in hype on a scale that has never been witnessed before. In combination with iTunes, the iPod did not take long to become the modern generation's best-selling "Walkman".

It is not only Apple fans but designers throughout the world that find the device so snazzy that it immediately bags the much-coveted "red dot design award".

• Goaded on by the success of the game consoles from "Sega", "Nintendo" and others, Bill Gates, in turn, fills the shop shelves with his "Xbox". It differs from all the competitors' models in that it has a built-in hard disk, but its price tag is a multiple of the others and it finally leads to a loss of a good four billion US dollars.

• SWITCH celebrates its 15th anniversary!

The birthday surprises include a brand-new 1-Gigabit line for the first Swiss universities. Time for some quick stocktaking:

→ The broadband in the backbone of the SWITCHlan Swiss academic network has grown a thousand-fold within three years, and the connection capacity of the universities has grown by a factor of 7800!

→ Thanks to the purchase of its own fibre optics, the universities using SWITCHlan now has a provider-independent, individually enhanceable, cost-neutral network, offering them a smooth ride into the future.

→ A word of warning! You might like to get your hanky out before opening the anniversary issue (in German). As you thumb your way through it, there is most definitely a risk of being overcome by nostalgia.

→ Question: roughly how many e-mails did students, researchers and lecturers then send and receive via the SWITCHlan research network every day? Correct answer: approximately ten million – 2000 times more than three years previously.

• In Switzerland, the first WLAN hotspots for public surfing appear.

• SWITCH starts to build up a system for group work for Swiss universities based on video conferencing and personal computers. The name of the resulting service: SWITCHcast.

• Competence for the registration and administration of the .ch domain names is transferred to the state as one of the elements in the "Decree on Addressing Resources in the Telecommunications Sector". Since April 2002, the supervisory authority in this field has been the Swiss Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), which begins by entrusting the task to SWITCH for a period of five years, which meant in practice the continuation of 'business as usual'.

2003

• In July, the French government decrees a nationwide ban on the term "e-mail", replacing it with "courriel".

• MySpace goes online and becomes the first social network through which users are able to make themselves eternal with photographs, texts and much more.

• Three worms make the security experts sit up and take notice. "SQL Slammer", "Blaster" and "Sobig.F" spread very quickly and cause system damage for many Internet users around the world.

• Tim Berners-Lee is knighted by the Queen.

• The iTunes Store opens its virtual doors in April. It is, however, going to take another two years until people living in Switzerland are able to go on a shopping spree there for MP3, podcast, and video products as well as apps and miscellaneous.

• Logitech sold its 500 millionth mouse.

• The 500 000th domain name is entered in SWITCH's database, which is an impressively high figure for a country with something over seven million inhabitants. With a domain-name density of nearly 7%, Switzerland is (and remains) one of the world's leaders in this respect!

• It is long overdue: a price for future-oriented projects making sustainable use of the Internet. In order to make it possible to foster precisely such innovations, SWITCH instigates the SWITCHaward. The promotional prize is worth CHF 15 000 and is theoretically there to be won by anyone achieving something special in the field of art, culture, research or education.

	A novel approach to the advertising hoardings in search for innovative Swiss people willing to think different.

• For the first time in Switzerland, voters in Anières, just outside of Geneva, are able to cast their referendum vote online. Of the 1162 registered voters, 323 make use of this facility. 

2004

• Switzerland, Austria and Germany introduce the possibility of registering Internet addresses including letters with umlauts.

• Google is floated on the securities exchange six years after its inception. This step results in an appreciable influx of new capital for the company.

• The social network Facebook goes online for the first time in February.

• The authoritative German dictionary, Duden, accepts the word "blog" as well as "to google" as a verb.

• Version 1.0 of the free browser "Firefox" makes its appearance. It takes it next to no time to become the biggest competitor of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

• 14 000 newly registered domain names in 24 hours – a Swiss record!
This sudden rush is triggered by SWITCH when it becomes the first registry in Europe to introduce internationalised domain names. A total of 31 new letters are accepted, including ä, ü and ö and various accents. The domain names the Swiss would most have liked to have are...

1. müller.ch
2. bücher.ch
3. zürich.ch
4. züri.ch
5. börse.ch
6. möbel.ch
7. büro.ch
8. käse.ch
9. töff.ch
10. lüthi.ch

• The growing demand for domain names is accompanied by an increase in the potential for conflict surrounding them. This leads SWITCH to launch its "dispute resolution service" that same year with the purpose of achieving out-of-court settlements to domain disputes.

• 61% of Swiss homes have Internet access in 2004. At the end of the year, the total number of domain names registered with SWITCH stands at 695 570.

• IPv6, here we come!

A good eight years before the assignment of the last IPv4 Internet address, it is possible for interested universities and researchers to test the IPv6 capability of their websites. SWITCH now provides them with an experimental network infrastructure with IPv6.

Leap forward in time → "World IPv6 Day" 

• Together with its colleagues from Austria (nic.at) and Germany (denic.de), SWITCH stage the first specialised domain conference under the name of "Domain Pulse". This annual event soon grows into the largest of its kind in the German-speaking world.

• Swisscom Mobile is the first mobile-telephony operator in Switzerland to commission its UMTS network for the wireless transmission of data, a network also capable of handling live television.

2005

Source: GoogleMaps

• Launch of the 3D panorama service "Google Earth" and "Google Maps", a combination of map view, route planner and satellite view.

• The year's strongest trends are telephoning for free using "Skype", transmitting files and communicating by means of videoconferencing. Nearly 50 million users have downloaded the "Voice-over-IP" program within less than two years – and a good 120 000 are joining them every day. Seven years later, Skype has already reached 35 million users worldwide.

• Around 120 000 users at nine Swiss universities are using SWITCHaai, giving them one universal-login access to all university-relevant contents.

• For the first time, Swiss Internet users are affected by "phishing". Hundreds of malicious e-mails are sent trying to entice bank clients to disclose their login data.

• "Schon vergeben." (Sorry, already gone) … Such is the first message in a three-part, light-hearted poster series organised by SWITCH, campaigning for domain names.

• The vision of e-academia comes appreciably nearer: For the first time, anyone connected with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Neuchatel University and Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur is able to surf anywhere in Switzerland without limitation from certain hotspots. SWITCHmobile makes that possible.

• ENUM (E164 number mapping) is a DNS-based service. This makes it possible to combine Internet telephones and telephoning. ENUM domain names can be registered for experimental operation starting in April.

2006

• 2006 is the breakthrough year for web videos – thanks to YouTube, Adobe's Flash video format and bigger and bigger Internet bandwidths.

• Nintendo's "WII" makes its first appearance on the shop shelves. Even hardened fitness freaks allow themselves to be tempted to join in "gaming" by the player's console with interactive operating elements.

• The social network "Facebook" decides to let non-students participate as well, and the micro-blogging service "Twitter" is launched. Both transforms social media into a mass phenomenon. Six years later, Facebook already has more than 900 million members, and Twitter has grown to 600 million.



 

• An electrical engineer based in Zurich receives CHF 50 000 in compensation for the domain names "schweiz.ch", "svizzera.ch" and "suisse.ch", which he is forced to surrender to the Swiss Confederation after holding them for five years.

• "Rings closed!" is the call that goes out five years after the start of the SWITCHlambda project. The Swiss university network has now become richer by a good 1850 kilometres of its own fibre optics. Once the expansion plans have been completed, the next job for SWITCH is to operate and monitor the network. It sometimes happens that that is not all that easy:

Did you know that...
...mice not only enjoy nibbling their way through Swiss cheese but through optical fibre cables too? No joke! SWITCH's network engineers have experienced the damage at first hand – and have secured clear evidence!

Photo mouse: Georg Shuklin

• Streaming is all the rage at Swiss universities. So SWITCH develops an export module with which lecturers can record their own podcasts and make them available to students. SWITCH's approach has continued to be regarded as outstanding right through to the present. Working jointly with e-learning specialists, SWITCH has been developing a portable lecture podcast, especially for the educational sector.

2007

• Google sents its "Street View" fleet out in the first US town to capture 360-degree images with a camera three metres above the ground. Only a year later, it is already possible to take a virtual stroll of discovery on "Google Street View" through the first streets, parks, gardens, etc. Shortly afterwards, indoor images are captured in US malls, shops and museums.

 

• Apple unveiles the prototype of its first iPhone. Long queues are being formed of those eager to buy one. On the first day of sales in the USA in June, shoppers even pitch tents in front of the Apple Store and spent the night there so as to be right at the front of the morning queue.

• Thanks to SWITCH PWLAN, it becomes possible for Swiss students and lecturers to surf the Internet free-of-charge from more than 2000 hotspots.

• The one millionth domain name goes to the Lucerne-based holder of "www.ez14.ch".

• More than a hundred classes and 2000 schoolchildren participate in the first edition of the newly launched SWITCH Junior Web Award. The competition to find the most impressive webpage, that has to be the class's own work, turns out to be a roaring success. 

• SWITCH moves out of its two office premises in Limmatquai and Neumühlequai to new offices in Werdstrasse 2. An unfortunate side-effect is the end of one of the city's most popular webcams. It is reinstalled with a view over the Zurich city centre and one end of Lake Zurich.

2008

• The first sighting of the computer worm, Conficker, which is still doing the Internet rounds today. 

• ICANN announces that as of mid-2009 Internet users are able to secure new web-address endings, such as ".town", ".love" or ".heaven".
 

• Mozilla publishes Firefox 3, which gives it a place in the Guinness Book of Records: for the largest number of software downloads within 24 hours.

• Amazon's Kindle revolutionises the culture of reading.   Source: Amazon.com

• Who has the most? The first-ever answers to that question are provides by SWITCH's domain-density map. It shows that one Swiss person in ten has managed to secure the domain they want.

Extrapolated for the preceding period of ten years (1999-2008), Zurich has been the Swiss city with the most domain names, ahead of Berne and Basel.

• A different form of "augmented reality": in November 2008, Switzerland hits the international headlines for being the first country where an employee is dismissed due to a Facebook entry.

• SWITCH starts building up a grid infrastructure throughout Switzerland.

2009

• Our next-door neighbours' equivalent of SWITCH, the German research network (DFN), celebrates its 25-year anniversary.

• Windows 7 turns out to be a success for Microsoft's image. After suffering severe setbacks with the preceding operating system, "Vista", the new one proves to be much better.

• The death of pop star Michael Jackson at the end of June prompts a new record. Internet traffic around the world reaches a historically high level. Key services and websites collapse entirely for some time under the server load.

• The manufacturer of anti-virus software "McAfee" confirmes: Swiss Internet addresses are amongst the most secure in the world! The national security team SWITCH-CERT is pleased to hear that, so are the country's Internet users.

• It could not have happened at a better moment: at the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI), SWITCH receives the "EDUCAUSE 2009 Catalyst Award" in Denver, Colorado. This prize is one of the most significant distinctions for Internet-based innovations in the research and education sector.

• In August, it becomes possible to tour Swiss cities too in "Google Street View". Basel, Berne, Geneva, Lausanne, Winterthur and Zurich are integrated in the 3D street panorama.

Grossmünster, Zurich 

• Premiere for the freshly launch "eduhub days". E-learning specialists from all over Switzerland come together, promoting a spirit of innovation and a convivial atmosphere.

• August 2009: SWITCH sets up its subsidiary switchplus so as to be able to offer customers not only domain names but hosting services as well. 

• The "ShanghAILecture" series starts as a revolutionary example of e-learning. Having been initiated by Zurich University and sponsored by GÉANT, the series of lectures on "artificial intelligence" is intended to reach a worldwide knowledge community of students and researchers.

Download (Pdf)

SWITCH joins in as well and, thanks to SWITCHlan, the World Resources Forum's first Internet conference is held simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland, and Nagoya, Japan. Three years later, the total number of student participants already exceeds a thousand, coming from more than forty universities all over the continents.

2010

• A good 25 years after its invention, Tetris remains the most successful computer game ever, establishing one record after the other. As a mobile-phone version, Tetris tops 100 million sales within the five years up to 2010.

The game's chief attraction remain the colourful "Tetrominos".

• Usenet is still alive and kicking. Meanwhile, it has become impossible to keep precise tabs on the number of groups worldwide, although it is estimated that there are likely to be up to 170 000.

• The first Apple iPad is sold – actually more than a million of them within the first four weeks.

• The World Wide Web is proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize upon the initiative of "Wired" magazine – along with 236 other nominations. The reason given is the important role the Internet has been playing in the civil-rights movements in the Middle East.

• Altitude record!
The High-Altitude Research Station on the Jungfraujoch is connected up to SWITCHlan, thus to the Internet and the Swiss academic network. At a height of 3500 metres above sea-level!

In the past without...

...as of now with high-speed Internet right up to the Jungfraujoch!

• SWITCH's new vision is presented: "SWITCH is opening up knowledge space".

• SWITCH is one of the first registries to introduce "DNSSEC" for ".ch" and ".li" addresses. Since then, it has been possible for holders of domains to sign them electronically and to protect them against manipulation in the Internet.

→ SWITCH's DNSSEC webpage

• The first companies launch SuisseID. Anyone who has it can use it for identification in the Internet and for legally binding signatures.

2011

• The inevitable finally comes true: In February, the "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" assigns the world's last free IPv4 Internet address. The version for the future is to be "IPv6", which is activated for the whole world for the first time at the beginning of June on the occasion of "World IPv6 Day".
→ Test here whether your computer is ready for IPv6!

• Google breaks through the billion-user barrier. That corresponds to half the people in the Internet. Around 95% of all the world's adults possess a mobile phone.

• No longer any excuse for infecting others with malware. SWITCH and the Swiss hosting providers agree to cut off immediately any websites spreading harmful software and infecting Internet users while surfing. Initial stocktaking shows that the measure is taking effect!

• April 2011: SWITCH counts 1.5 million ".ch" domain names registered and 65000 ".li" domain names.

• SWITCH calls on the universities to participate in the IPv6 competition. The winner is Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Its homepage, "www.zfh.ch", is the first official website of a Swiss university to be accessible through IPv6.

2012

• GÉANT announces a terabit network for Europe. The European research network interlinks the academic networks of 26 countries (including Switzerland) and also links them to key international research networks.

• Skype's iPhone app has resulted in undreamt-of records for the videoconferencing service: At the end of February, 32 million Internet users accessed it simultaneously. By the end of March, the figure has already increased by three million. That is encouraging news for Microsoft, which bought up Skype half way through 2011 for USD 8.5 million.

• Google is going under water: In February, it discloses information on the planned cooperation with Queensland University to produce 360-degree underwater images of the Great Barrier Reef.

Source: Underwater Earth, Caitlin Seaview Survey

This is a trial run and part of the "Seaview" project to map all the oceans for scientific purposes. The photographs are to be taken with a 360-degree camera with its own propulsion. A diver is to hold on to the back of it and to chug through the water at a mean speed of 4 km/h, while the camera takes an automatic shot every 4-6 seconds.

• From 2012 on, it is possible to apply for any term as an address ending, with the so-called "gTLDs", new generic top-level domains. There are thus no longer any barriers to striking addresses such as "www.funny.joke" or "www.study.eth".

• Taking the world as a whole, some 200 billion mails are sent each day.

• In February, SWITCH's webcam on the Jungfraujoch starts transmitting live pictures in HD quality from a height of 3500 metres. That is not only a considerable help to meteorological researchers in Switzerland but also a spectacle for panorama lovers – on 364 days of the year.

A test for those who think they know Switzerland's mountains like the back of their hand. Our picture contains a mistake. Can you spot it?

• In May, Dr. Andreas Dudler becomes the new Managing Director of SWITCH.

• The Swiss Federal Court has handed down an important judgment. Google Street View is not permitted to take photographs looking over Swiss garden fences without the approval of those concerned. The Street-View fleet is going to have to set off again and take photographs from normal head height.

This is what Google's Street-View camera looks like.

• Some 70% of the Swiss population are regularly in the Internet.

• A double jubilee celebration for Switzerland and SWITCH (not a coincidence...): 25 years of the ".ch" domain – and "mother" SWITCH".

2013

• As first organisation ever, SWITCH has gained a place in the Hall of Fame for the "Best of Swiss Web" competition – having been awarded the commendation prize. The honorific speech is being delivered by Internet "guru" Vinton Cerf.

To be continued...