Chronology

1950 - Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer
1954 - First meeting of SHARE, a group of IBM users
1954 - Early computer music performance at MoMA by the founders of Computer Music Center at Columbia University
1963 - ASCII is first used
1964 - Marshall McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" is published
1966 - E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc.): performances by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver, e. g.
1967 - Sony releases the PortaPak, the first portable video camera
1968 - "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London
1970 - The exhibition "Software" at the Jewish Museum, New York, treats computer programming as a metaphor for conceptual art
1971 - Floppy diskette invented by IBM
1972 - Atari video game company debuts with Pong
1974 - Nam June Paik coins term "information superhighway"
1976 - Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs form the Apple Computer Company
1977 - Apple II is released, as is Tandy TRB-80 (which sells 10,000 units in first month of market)
1979 - First Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria
1981 - MS-DOS operating system debuts on IBM computers
1982 - "Time" magazine names "the computer" its Man of the Year
1983 - MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) debuts at the first North American Music Manufacturers  show in Los Angeles
1984 - William Gibson'n novel "Neuromancer" is published, coining the phrase "cyberspace"
1985 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab is founded
1988 - Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) holds its first symposium
1989 - ZKM (Center for Art and Media), a New Media art museum and research institute, founded in Karlsruhe, Germany
1990 - Word Wide Web makes its debuts
1990 - Tim Berners-Lee develops HTML
1990 - Robert Riley organizes "Bay Area Media" an exhibition that features several works of computer-based art, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1991 - The Thing, a BBS for artists, founded
1991 - Linux 0.01 debuts
1993 - "Wired" magazine debuts
1994 - Netscape goes public
1995 - artnetweb founded in New York
1995 - The Whitney Museum of American Art becomes the first museum to acquire a work at Net art: Douglas Davis' "The World's First Collaborative Sentence" (1994)
1995 - Dia Center for Arts launches Artists' Web Projects programme
1996 - Webby Awards and International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) founded
1996 - Polaroid releases a 1-megapixel digital camera
1996 - Eyebeam founded in New York
1996 - Rizhome.org founded in Berlin
1997 - Foundation Daniel Langlois pour l'art, la science et la technologie founded in Montreal
1997 - The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis launches Gallery 9, a commissioning programme and extensive online gallery of New Media art
1997 - The international contemporary art exhibition documenta X features Net art prominently in a separate "Hybrid Workspace" section
1997 - InterCommunication Center opens in Tokyo
1997 - The ZKM Center for Art and Media opens
1998 - Netscape announces that it will make its source code freely available to the public
1998 - The Web becomes truly worldwide when the last 21 nations come online
1999 - AOL acquires Netscape for $4.2 billion
1999 - "net_condition" exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe
2000 - American stock markets crash, marks end of dot-com bubble
2000 - Whitney Biennial includes Net art
2001 - The Whitney Museum of American Art stages the exhibition "Bitstreams", including New Media art as well as painting, photography and sculptures
2002 - Metropolitan Museum of Art buys "Every Shot/Every Episode" by the McCoys
2003 - New Museum affiliates with Rhizome.org
2004 - Google goes public; its IPO fetches $1.7 billion
2005 - U.S. Supreme Court holds peer-to-peer software manufactures can be held liable when people use their wares to infringe copyright

Source: New Media art by Mark Tribe/Reena Jana