| 1953 | First issue of TV Guide published. |
| 1969 | First Arpanet node comes online; first RFC published. |
| 1973 | Ethernet invented by Xerox PARC researchers. |
| 1982 | TCP/IP replaces older Arpanet protocols on the Internet. |
| 1982 | First distributed computing research paper on Grapevine published by Xerox PARC researchers. |
| 1984 | Internet DNS comes online. |
| 1986 | IETF formally chartered. |
| 1989 | Quipu (X.500 software package) released. |
| 1990 | Estimated number of Internet hosts exceeds 250,000. |
| 1990 | First version of the X.500 standard published. |
| 1991 | A team at CERN headed by Tim Berners-Lee releases the first World Wide Web software. |
| 1992 | University of Michigan developers release the first LDAP software. |
| 1993 | NDS debuts in Netware 4.0. |
| July 1993 | LDAP specification first published as RFC 1487. |
| December 1995 | First standalone LDAP server (SLAPD) ships as part of U-M LDAP 3.2 release. |
| April 1996 | Consortium of more than 40 leading software vendors endorses LDAP as the Internet directory service protocol of choice. |
| November 1997 | LDAPv3 named the winner of the PC Magazine Award for Technical Excellence. |
| December 1997 | LDAPv3 approved as a proposed Internet Standard. |
| January 1998 | Netscape ships the first commercial LDAPv3 directory server. |
| July 1998 | Estimated number of Internet hosts exceeds 36 million. |