Well, it’s official. We use the internet every day. Everyone is on Facebook. Google or Bing is your default search engine. Almost everyone has that one embarrassing video on YouTube. Your morning begins with that awesome Ted video and ends with your favorite song on Spotify or Last.fm. But how much do you know about the Internet revolution? The Internet is a modern marvel and today, I’ll be telling you no less than 16 fun facts and interesting things about it.
Let’s find out how all this began with this list of funny, amazing, and interesting facts about the Internet:
- The work behind the internet began back in the 1960s at MIT. The first message ever transmitted over the internet was LOG. Why? The user had attempted to type LOGIN but the server couldn’t take the heavy load and crashed after G.
- The first web page ever created was this. This webpage contains information about the “World Wide Web” project and how you can make a simple webpage with links.
- The first webcam was used to monitor a coffee pot at Cambridge University.
- The first-ever banner ad invaded the Internet in 1994. The ad was part of AT&T’s “you will” campaign, and was placed on the HotWired homepage.
- The first emoticon, created in 1979, was rather simple -) and didn’t look like a face. 3 years later, 🙂 was proposed by Scott Fahlman.
- The first music-sharing service, Napster, went live in 1998.
- Since the creation of the internet, file sharing has been a major issue for the authorities. In 1989, McGill University shut down its FTP indexing site after it discovered that its website was responsible for over half of the traffic going from America to Canada.
- As of 2010, Google says that the Internet today contains about 5 million terabytes of data and claims it has only indexed around 0.04% of it all!
- Over half of all the downloading and uploading online is file-sharing which is often considered illegal.
- To copy the entire internet to a disc, it would take over one billion DVDs. And if you want to save it on the more powerful Blu-Ray discs it would take about 200 million of them.
- Approximately 250 billion emails are sent every day, out of which 80% are pure spam.
- About 20-25 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube from around the globe each minute. The first-ever YouTube video was uploaded on April 23rd, 2005, by Jawed Karim (one of the founders of the site) and was 18 seconds long, entitled “Me at the Zoo”.
- The very first spam email was sent in 1978 when DEC released a new computer and operating system, and a DEC marketeer decided to send a mass email to 600 users and administrators of the ARPANET. The guy who had typed it all in didn’t quite understand the system, and ended up typing the addresses first into the Subject, which then overflowed into the To: field, the CC: field, and finally the email body too! And thus, after that, the term “spam” was coined.
- The internet took a total of 4 years to reach an audience of 50 million; it took radio 38 years and television 13 years.
- Each day, about 30 million people “tweet”.
Do you know of any other awesome facts about the Internet? If so, share them in the comments below!
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