In the digitized, Internet has become an integral part of our lives. Internet which has become base of our communication and information exchange has turned 25 years old today. Here are some interesting facts about the journey of Internet so far.
#1. Computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of internet or World Wide Web (www). Sir Lee developed internet at CERN Labs in Switzerland. Sir Tim wrote the protocol for WWW on a NeXT machine, a computer developed by late Steve Jobs, who was CEO of Apple .
# 2. Sir Lee built HTML, URL, a web browser, server and the very first web page in 1990. The very first web page based on this architecture went live on August 6, 1991. While the first page was only accessible to CERN members, the first publicly available web page was accessed on August 23, 1991.
#3. The exact date of birth of Internet is disputed, but many internet users celebrate the 23 August as Internaut Day, marking 25 years of World Wide Web. CERN has marked August 6, 1991 as the official date of Internaut Day.
# 4. Internet sends approximately 204 million emails per minute and 70 per cent of all the mails sent are spam. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson to himself. The first spam email was sent in 1978 over ARPNET by a guy named Gary Thuerk. About 2 billion electrons are required to produce a single email.
#5. Over 100,000 new dot com domains are registered on the web every day. The first registered domain was symbolics.com. The first YouTube video “Me at the zoo” was uploaded April 23, 2005. The first webcam was created at the University Of Cambridge to monitor the Trojan coffee pot. The term “surfing” the internet was coined in 1992 by an upstate New York librarian Jean Armour Polly.
#6. While the Internet users are growing worldwide, only 37.9 per cent of people have access to the Internet once a year or more. A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer. The most expensive keyword for Google AdWords is “insurance”. The world record for the fastest time to log into a Gmail account is 1.16 seconds.
#7. The majority of Internet traffic is not generated by humans, but by bots and malware. Over 30,000 websites are hacked every day. According to a recent study conducted by Incapsula, 62 per cent or nearly two-thirds of all the website traffic is caused by Internet bots.
#9. While Internet is connecting the world, it has also led to the rise of deceases such as obsession and anxiety. China has treatment camps for internet addicts. About 40 per cent of those addicted to the Internet suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
#10. According to IDC’s forecast about 3.2 billion people, or 44 per cent of the world’s population, will have access to the Internet in 2016. The report states that China, India, and Indonesia lead in the internet consumption and will account for almost half of the gains in access globally over the course of the next five years. According to Nasscom Akamai Technologies survey, there will be 730 million internet users in India by 2020.