50 Amazing Facts about Internet

Did you know that internet took only 4 years to reach 50 million users? It took 38 years for radio, while TV made it in 13 years. Here are more of such amazing facts about internet:

1. Worldwide Web was developed in Objective C programming language.

2. The “www” part of a web site is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard.

3. All three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.

4. The term Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

5. The Internet was called the ‘Galactic Network’ in memos written by MIT’s JCR Licklider in 1962.

6. Researchers consider that the first search engine was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

7. It was once considered a letter in the English language. The Chinese call it a little mouse, Danes and Swedes call it ‘elephant’s trunk’, Germans a spider monkey, and Italians a snail. Israelis pronounce it ‘strudels’ and the Czechs say ‘rollmops’s…What is it? The @ sign.

8. Did you know that the original URL of Yahoo! was http://akebono.stanford.edu/.

9. Google got its name from the mathematical figure googol, which denotes the number ‘one followed by a hundred zeros’.

10. Yahoo! derived its name from the word Yahoo coined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo is a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human!

11. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare, is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know the HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, the submit button was a later addition and initially, hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

12. The word ‘e-mail’ has been banned by the French Ministry of culture. They are required to use the word ‘Courriel’ instead, which is the French equivalent of Internet. This move became the subject of ridicule from the cyber community in general.

13. The first ever ISP was CompuServe which still exists under AOL, Timer Warner.

14. Did you know that www.symbolics.com was the first ever domain name registered online? It was registered on 15 March, 1985 in Massachusetts.

15. According to a University of Minnesota report, researchers estimate the volume of Internet traffic is growing at an annual rate of 50 to 60 per cent.

16. If you want to sell your book on amazon.com you can set the price, but then they will take 55 per cent cut and leave you with only 45 per cent.

17. Almost half of people online have at least three e-mail accounts. In addition the average consumer has maintained the same e-mail address for four to six years.

18. Spam accounts for over 60 per cent of all email, according to Message Labs. Google says at least one third of all Gmail servers are filled with spam.

19. Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spam (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21, 2005.

20. The first web site was built at CERN. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research and is located at Geneva, Switzerland.

21. The World Wide Web is the most extensive implementation of the hypertext but it is not the only one. A computer help file is actually a hypertext document.

22. The concept of style sheets was already in place when the first browser was released.

23. The address of the world’s first web server is http://info.cern.ch/ The URL of the first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Although this page is not hosted anymore at CERN, a later version of the page is posted at http://www.w3.org/History/199921103hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

24. The first browser that made the web available to PC and Mac users was Mosaic. It was developed by National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) led by Marc Andreessen in February, 1993. Mosaic was one of the first graphical web browsers and led to an explosion in web use.

25. April 30, 1993 is an important date for the Web because on that day, CERN announced that anyone may use WWW technology freely.

26. Microsoft released Internet Explorer on 1995. This event initiated the browser wars. By bundling internet explorer with the Windows operating system, by 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share over 95 per cent.

27. The development of standards for the World Wide Web is managed by the W3C or the World Wide Web consortium. The W3C was founded in October, 1994 and headed by Tim Berners-Lee.

28. Only 4 per cent of Arab women use the Internet. Moroccan women represent almost a third of that figure.

29. YouTube‘s bandwidth requirements to upload and view all those videos cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and drawing. The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its upkeep.

30. According to AT&T vice president Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute. This was on April 2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube received 20 hours of video content per minute.

31. Around 75 per cent of the music that is available for download has never been purchased and it is costing money just to be on the server.

32. Domain registration was free until the National Science foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995.

33. It is estimated that one of every eight married couples started by meeting online.

34. Iceland has the highest percentage of the Internet users at 68 per cent. The United States stands at 56%. 34% of all Malaysians us the Internet while only eight per cent of Jordanians are connected, 4% of Palestinians; 0.6% of Nigerians and 0.1% of Tajikistanis.

35. Employees at Google are encouraged to use 20 per cent of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

36. The technology behind the Internet began back in the 1960′s at MIT. The first message ever to be transmitted was LOG.. why? The user had attempted to type LOGIN, but the network crashed after the enormous load of data of the letter G. It was to be a while before Facebook would be developed

37. The first emoticon is commonly credited to Kevin Mackenzie in 1979, but was a rather simple -) and didn’t really look like a face. 3 years later, 🙂
was proposed by Scott Fahlman and has become the norm.

38. Ever since the birth of the Internet, file sharing was a problem for the authorities that managed it. In 1989, McGill University shut down their FTP indexing site after finding out that it was responsible for half of the Internet traffic from America into Canada. Fortunately, a number of similar file indexing sites had already been made.

39. Google estimates that the Internet today contains about 5 million terabytes of data (1TB = 1,000GB), and claims it has only indexed a paltry 0.04% of it all! You could fit the whole Internet on just 200 million Blu-Ray disks.

40. Speaking of search – One THIRD of all Internet searches are specifically for pornography. It is estimated that 80% of all images on the Internet are of naked women.

41. According to legend, Amazon became the number one shopping site because in the days before the invention of the search giant Google, Yahoo would list the sites in their directory alphabetically!

42. The first ever banner ad invaded the Internet in 1994, and it was just as bad as today. The ad was part of AT&Ts “you will” campaign, and was placed on the HotWired homepage.

43. Of the 247 BILLION email messages sent every day, 81% are pure spam.

44. 35.6% of internet users are Asia. With average of 389 million of internet surfers each month, Asia is the largest internet crowd among other world regions. In Asia, 10 out of 100 surf the Internet.

45. Only 16.6% of world population surf the internet. Amount of internet surfers in Asia (389,392,28 mil) is 11 times the population of Australia (34,468,443 mil). 19% of internet users are from United States (210,080,067 mil). Around 18 countries still doesn’t have Internet connection. North Korea’s internet penetration statistics is not publicized.

46. The first Internet worm was created by Robert T.Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6000 Internet hosts.

47. According to The Economist magazine, the first truly electronic bank on the Internet, called First Virtual Holdings, was opened by Lee Stein in 1994.

48. The ‘Dilbert Zone‘ Web site was the first syndicated comic strip site available on the Internet.

49. Did you know that domain names could be sold at high prices? The most expensive domain till date, ‘sex.com’ was purchased by Escom LLC at $14 million, in January 2006.  Another was ‘business.com‘, which was sold to eCompanies for $7.5 million in 1999.

50. The Internet is the third-most used advertising medium in the world, closely catching up with traditional local newspapers and Yellow Pages.