EPA's Public Access Internet Timeline

Nov 93

Inception of the Gopher which was EPA's first instance of routinely sharing public information over the Internet. At the time Gopher was the state-of-the-art Internet application that preceded the World Wide Web.

May 94

EPA became one of the early adopters for sharing information via the World Wide Web. EPA maintained both Gopher and WWW presences until 1997 when the Gopher was de-commissioned.

Fall 94

Published Federal Register documents to the Internet, and created a subset of the Register containing just environmental records. Later created listservers, specialized mailing lists to automatically alert customers about new environmental subset notices released on a daily basis.

Aug 94

Created a Lotus Notes application to permit access to Agency press releases through the Internet.

Early 95

For the first time customers could obtain timely data from major EPA legacy systems from the Envirofacts warehouse, a central repository for extracted data from these systems.

1996

Redesigned the Web site adding additional functionality that permitted topical and specialized audience retrieval capability.

Early 97

The national Site Info (Maps on Demand) application became live. Customers would specify the parameters for map generation and then be alerted by email when the map had finished processing offline.

1997

Incorporated a standard "look and feel" to the upper level pages of the site to give coherency and consistency for visitors.

Late 97

The "Search by Zip Code" feature was activated by which customers could identify significant environmental and facility information in their geographic area.

Apr 98

Enviromapper allows real-time, interactive generation of maps.

Mid 98

A new concept for public access at EPA, the Web Inventory was being, and is continuing to be developed. This is the undergirding for the incipient "My Yahoo" type model for EPA's Internet page.

Sept 95

1 Million

Feb 96

2 Million

Feb 97

6 Million

Feb 98

28 Million

Feb 99

49 Million

Jan 00

71 Million

1993

41102

1996

24795

1997

22817

1998

20436

1999

18121