• DIALOG Information Services files $150 million lawsuit against CAS, charging violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for attempting to monopolize control of the chemical literature.
• CAS responds to DIALOG lawsuit and countersues for $30 million, charging DIALOG with breach of contract and fraud.
• October: Tim Berners-Lee begins work on a hypertext GUI browser on the NeXT environment.  Coins the term "World Wide Web" as a name for the program. 
• November: First Web page, developed by Tim Berners-Lee, appears on the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)Web server.  This program ran on the NeXT operating system and not many people used it.
• Archie (short for "archiver") software (which indexes ftp sites) released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill University.
• Hytelnet (a worldwide directory of FTP sites) released by Peter Scott (Univ of Saskatchewan)

• Gmelin Database is made commercially available.
• The CORE project, to create a prototype of an electronic library of ACS journals, is established cooperatively by ACS, CAS, Bellcore, OCLC, and Cornell University.
• US High Performance Computing Act (sponsored by Sen. Al Gore) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN)
• Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation. An indexing system for documents that indexes the full text of the documents, and scores searches on the basis of the relevance of its vocabulary to the search terms.
• Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ of Minnesota.  This an easy-to-use menu system for exploring the Internet.  Named for the Univ. of Minnesota mascot.

• January: Internet Society is established.
• Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada.  This gopher-based search engine worked with an index of gopher menus around the world and was the "work-horse" of early users (including librarians) of the Internet.  The name supposedly stood for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives but more likely matched the earlier archie and jughead names, referring to comic strip characters.

• April: Finnish "ERWISE" GUI client for X released.

• May: Pei Wei's (Univ. of California, Berkeley) Viola GUI browser for X test version released.
• July: WWW client software released by CERN
• November: First sites (about 23 servers) appear on the World Wide Web.

• DIALOG and CAS settle lawsuit and promise further cooperation; terms not disclosed.
• March: WWW (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 0.1% of NSF backbone traffic.
• February: NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications) releases first version of "Mosaic for X" developed by Marc Andreessen.
• April: CERN declares that WWW technology would be freely available to anyone for development.
• September: WWW (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 1% of NSF backbone traffic. NCSA releases working versions of Mosaic for all common platforms: X, PC/Windows and Macintosh.
• November: First webcam, XCoffee, appears online.
• December: first extensive publicity (New York Times, etc.) on WWW.
• US National Information Infrastructure Act.

• March: Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp., later Netscape Communications.
• May: First International WWW Conference, CERN, Geneva.
• October: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded.

• Beilstein CrossFire, a user-friendly interface with the Beilstein database, is launched.

• SciFinder, a client server for scientists, is marketed by CAS.
• CAS Registry System records over 1 million new substances this year (Weisgerber, 1997).
• CAS begins Internet coverage of chemical science resources on the Internet that are only available in electronic form.
• STN Easy opens World Wide Web access to a set of STN files.
• September: Domain name (.com, .gov., etc.) registration is now fee-based, except for .edu and .gov. Previously subsidized by NSF.

• ACS creates ChemCenter, a web service to access a wide variety of chemical information. Includes full text of 26 ACS journals.
• US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law. This law prohibits distribution of indecent materials over the Net. Most of the law is later declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
• Brewster Kahle co-founds the Internet Archive

• At the end of the year, the Registry file contains 17.2 million substances. The Registry database contains over 23 million names.

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