1972 Electronic mail is introduced. Queen Elizabeth sends her first email in 1976. The first effort to index the Internet is created by Peter Deutsch at McGill University in Montreal, who devises Archie, an archive of FTP sites. Unlike other Internet protocols, such as FTP and email, the Web is accessible through a graphical user interface. Gopher, the first user-friendly interface, is created at the University of Minnesota and named after the school mascot.
Gopher becomes the most popular interface for several years.
The broadcast generates 46 million hits in one day. The number of Internet users worldwide reaches 150 million by the beginning of 1999. To the chagrin of the Internet population, deviant computer programmers begin designing and circulating viruses with greater frequency. The heavy volume of email messages being sent and received forces many infected companies to temporarily shut down their clogged networks. Napster is dealt a potentially fatal blow when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rules that the company is violating copyright laws and orders it to stop distributing copyrighted music.