“The Internet” is a very important part of our lives and has made our lives very easy. We are just a click away from anything and everything we want. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Internet has become a necessity for all of us.
Despite its importance in our lives, do we know the “History of the Internet” or “Internet Evolution”? There are surely many more questions which come to our minds about the Internet.
Did You Know?
When was the Internet invented?
Who invented the Internet?
What year was the Internet made?
How much Internet Weigh?
Who sent the first email?
Who sent the first spam email?
Check out answers to these interesting questions about the Internet and many other amazing facts about the Internet
Table of Contents
Fact #1 Internet and “World Wide Web”
The Internet is a huge network of networks connecting different computers with each other globally by using different wired or “wireless technologies”. The Internet can simply be stated as a medium which connects millions of computers worldwide.
The Internet and the “World Wide Web”(www) or simply the Web are often confused with each other. On many occasions, we interchangeably use both terms. But these both are entirely different terms.
The web is simply a vast collection of linked documents, pages and other web resources. And we access all these pages and web resources via the Internet.
“The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URIs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet” Source Wikipedia
Fact #2 Internet History and “ARPANET”
Internet history dates back to the 1950s and it evolved with the development of computers and packet networking. In the late 1960s, extensive research was being carried out on packet networking concepts. Various Packet switching networks like ARPANET, NPL network, Telenet etc were developed. In the 1960s first workable internet was made online with the development of “ARPANET”.
Advanced Research Project Agency Network or ARPANET was funded by the U.S. Department of Defence. ARPANET uses packet switching to communicate among multiple computers over a single network.
On 1 January 1983 ARPANET adopted Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP. TCP/IP is a communication model which sets standards for how data transfer would take place between multiple networks. After these researchers started to work on linking different networks with each other and thus, the modern-day internet was born.
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Fact #3 Tim Berners – Lee
The Internet is the result of many years of research and work of many Scientists, programmers and engineers, who developed different technologies and features over time, which merged and shaped the modern-day internet. So, it would be very difficult and impossible to credit a single person for the invention of the Internet.
In August 1962, J.R.C. Licklinder published the paper On-Line Man-Computer Communication along with Welden Clark. This paper gave the first-ever descriptions of future networks and popularized the idea of Intergalactic Networks of computers. In October 1962, J.R.C Licklinder was appointed as the director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) under DARPA and further research was started. Lawrence Roberts and Robert Taylor, Licklinder’s successors, worked on his vision of an Intergalactic Network and worked on the further development of ARPANET.
English scientist Tim Berners–Lee devised the concept and first implemented successful communication between HTTP and server via the Internet in 1982. He is the inventor of the World Wide Web and is the director of the “World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).” World Wide Web Consortium is the body which supervises the development of the web.
In the mid-1990s internet revolutionised our lives with the invention of services like electronic mail, and instant messaging. Interactive video calls, Voice over internet protocol telephone calls just changed the conventional communication system. The web became the information superhighway with zillions of blogs, websites, forums, social networking and shopping websites.
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Facts #4 Age of the Internet
There is a website which keeps a record of the age of the Internet and today the Internet is 11077 days old. It has been 18208 days since the time Internet Technology was made. Check HowOldIsTheInter.net to get the current stats.
The first ever website was made live on 6 August 1991 and it’s still running. This website was created by Tim Berners–Lee. It contained all the information on the World Wide Web project, and explained the concepts of hypertext and how to create web pages. Check out the website http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
www.symbolics.com was the first domain registered online. Symbolics.com was registered on 15 March 1985. They sold the domain to XF.com in 2009.
Fact #5 Energy Required to Run Internet
So many electronic devices are connected to the internet and it’s really out of imagination how much electrical energy is required to run the internet just for a single day. This question was answered by a physicist, Russell Seitz. He did the calculations and discovered that approximately 50 million horsepower is required to run the internet in its present state. He further calculated and said the whole of the internet weighs just two ounces. He said that the weight of the internet is as much as of a strawberry. How could such a huge thing weigh so little?
The answer to this typical question was easily solved by Einstein’s Equation E=mc2
Russell Seitz,on his website, Adamant, offers this quick calculation:
A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and as the electron’s mass is 9.1 x ten to the minus 31 grams, an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, and the average chip runs at a Gigaher[t]z, fairly straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet. [50 g = roughly 2 ounces.]
Michael Stevens, the narrator on the vsauce video, “How Much Does the Internet Weigh?“
Fact #6 Tim Berners–Lee Uploaded First Ever Image to the Internet
The first ever image uploaded to the internet was by Tim Berners–Lee, father of the World Wide Web. The ladies in the photo were in the musical band Les Horrible Cernettes, a comedy band in CERN Laboratory. The photo of these lovely ladies was tweaked in the first version of Photoshop before being uploaded as a GIF file.
Tim Berners–Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work and services in the global development of the Internet. He was honoured at Buckingham Palace with the title of Knight Commander.
Fact #7 Online Dating Websites – One Billion Dollars Revenue
Revenue of more than 1 billion dollars is generated by people around the world by using Online dating websites. An average of $243 is spent by people on online dating every year.
Around 91 million people are using dating apps around the world between the age group of 16 to 34. As per stats from Match.com around one million babies have been born from people who met on their dating website.
As per some estimates by researchers, one-third of the searches on the internet are for pornography.
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Fact #8 Best Internet Connection Speeds
South Korea and Japan have the best internet connection speeds among all the countries in the world. Strangely, the United States being the founding father of the Internet does not have any city on the list of top 50 best-connected cities in the world. Boston is the first city in the United States and is placed in 51st place.
The United States doesn’t even come in the top 10 best-connected internet speed countries. It stands the on12th place. While South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan share the first three spots respectively.
Facts #9 Emails
United States Programmer, Ray Samul Tomlinson, set up an email system on ARPANET, in 1971. The first test mail he sent was something like “QWERTYUIOP”.
Nowadays almost 294 billion emails are sent and received every day and over 100 Trillion per year. A whopping 90% of all these emails are spam or viruses.
The first email spam was believed to have been sent by Gary Thuerk in 1978. Gary Thuerk, a marketer at Digital Equipment Corporation, was promoting Digital’s DEC 2020 computer and sent it to around 400 people in the ARPANET.
Here is the content of the first-ever spam mail
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 (PDP-10) COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM. THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.
WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 – 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CATHURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 – 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.
Facts #10 Internet Addiction
Nowadays Internet addiction among the youngster is increasing very rapidly. China has military-run treatment camps for such internet addicts. Researchers are debating on adding Internet addiction to the list of mental disorders.
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase “Surfing the Internet”. In 1992 she wrote an article Surfing the Internet which was published in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin. She was a librarian by profession in New York.
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Some More Fun Facts Facts about the Internet 2023
- LasVegas.com is the most expensive domain name ever sold. It was bought in 2005 for a whopping $90 million.
- Google is the world’s most visited website, followed by YouTube and Facebook. Chinese search engine Baidu is the world’s fourth most visited website.
- The Internet Hit 5.1 Billion Users in the world as of December 2023
- Asia has the most Internet users of all continents almost 49 percent of all Internet users. Europe comes second with 16.8 per cent of all Internet users.
- China has some 1.05 billion Internet users and India has 692.0 million Internet users in 2023
- There are 1.13 billion websites in the world as of February 2023 of which 82% were deactivated, which means around 200 million websites are active.
- Over 6 million blog posts are published on the Internet every day in 2023
- Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, corresponding to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.
- Over 8.5 billion Google searches are made every day.
- 96.5 per cent of citizens of Iceland use the Internet. The Falkland Islands has the highest internet penetration rate of 96.9 per cent
- Around 30,000 websites are hacked every day globally
- 56 per cent of all internet traffic is from automated sources such as hacking tools, scrapers and spammers, impersonators, and bots.
- GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar, with over 84 million registered domain names
