Yesterday was my website's birthday. Not this website, the other one. It turned twelve—a long, long time in web years. What has happened since 1994?

The short answer is everything, but let's delve into a little more detail, shall we? I've included screenshots of RAN.org from each year, so you can play along at home.

1994

• Tim Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• The brand new Netscape begins to chip away at Mosaic
• Al Gore coins the term "Information Superhighway"
• Yahoo goes live
• The now ubiquitous programming language PHP is released

1995

• Java and JavaScript join the party
• Amazon starts books so cheap, everyone says it can't last
• People can now "find it on eBay"
• Suck creates the first generation of internet famous
• Craig starts a list

1996

• The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is incorporated, using data gathered from Usenet
• Macromedia releases Flash spawning millions of terrible websites
• US Robotics develops a Pilot that fits in your palm
• I graduate high school

1997

• The first PCs for less than $1000 emerge
• The Dancing Baby debuts
• Altavista's Babel Fish offers sometimes useful translations
• The first DVDs go on sale

1998

• The DMCA is passed, many protest
• Windows 98 is released
• Google goes live, its importance is somewhat understated at first
• Megapopular Open Source database MySQL is released

1999

• The Y2K freakout begins
• The launch of Napster sounds the death knell for the music industry
• Seminal massively multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG) Everquest is released
• Prince parties, presumably

2000

• AOL, a cute little internet company, buys Time Warner, a ginormous media conglomerate
• Microsoft loses it's anti-trust case United States v. Microsoft
• Gore loses Bush v. Gore (and the presidency)
• I graduate from college

2001

• The launch of Wikipedia tears down the Ivory Tower
• Suck posts its last article
• The iPod debuts, it seems very expensive
• Napster shuts down under the weight of multiple law suits
• Somebody sets us up the bomb

2002

• eBay buys PayPal, the only "Dot.com buys Dot.com" move that has ever seemed like a no-brainer to me
• Old school social networking site Friendster goes live
• Google News removes editors from the equation and offers algorithmically selected headlines
• The first Creative Commons licenses released

2003

• MP3.com shuts down
• Social bookmarking site del.icio.us goes live
• Google, not the first to recognize the growing power of blogs, buys Blogger
• MySpace begins its rise to fame and subsequent descent to infamy
• MMORPG Second Life is made public, no orcs are included

2004

• Photo sharing site Flickr goes live and allows people to look up ex-boy/girlfriends and see if they're fat
• GMail introduced, requiring an invite for the tasty AJAX action
• 37signals releases some of the code to their product Basecamp as Ruby on Rails
• First mention of "Web 2.0"
• I take over design at RAN.org

2005

• YouTube goes live, amidst shrieks of "Be the media!" and "OMG, I can't believe he ate that!"
• eBay buys Skype
• Adobe buys Macromedia
• Dog eats dog

2006

• Google buys YouTube, heads are scratched
• Despite a widespread awareness-raising campaign, "Network Neutrality" laws fail to pass
• Microsoft releases the Zune just in time for Xmas, in lump-of-coal black or log-of-shit brown
• I relaunch Sunshocked and resurrect the Stanifesto

Next year, I get to deal with a surly teenager.