Hong Kong returned to China. Summit '97 held in Helsinki. Deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa.
FUNET-TV launched with 'multicasts' of Web University lectures from CERN and the information society forum Studia Generalia.
The World Wide Web Consortium publishes version 4.0 of the HTML language used to create web pages. This includes multimedia features, UNICODE support, for displaying the world's various languages, and features that help people with disabilities use the Net.
The Internet2 project is announced in the US to develop within two years new Internet services for the research community, such as interactive TV, videoconferencing and remote presence for teaching and research. For this collaboration, the research community began to construct new Internet connections, which initially ran at 620 Mbit/s, increasing to 2.4 Gbit/s at the beginning of 1999.
