Internet

HISTORY

J.C.R. Licklider, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher and professor, outlined his vision of a Galactic Network of computers that allowed users to gather data and access programs anywhere in the world in a series of papers. The first his seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis written in 1960, foreshadowed interactive computing. The second, On-Line Man Computer Communication, was published two years later and took the Galactic Network idea further, promoting the concept of social interaction through the networking of computers.  Licklider's Galactic Network concept proved to be influential in early development of the ARPANET.

The first-ever computer-to-computer link was established by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" (DARPA) on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet at 10:30pm on October 29, 1969. UCLA student programmer Charley Kline sent the first message from one computer to another on that day.

Charley Kline sent 1st message from one computer to another, recorded here Wikipedia

The message was intended to be the word "login," but the ARPANET connection crashed in the middle, so the first message was just “lo."

The first thing ever sold on the internet was a bag of weed. In the early 1970s Stanford students used ARPANET accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to engage in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

Seven  years before America developed ARPANET Soviets were working on their version of internet called OGAS. The project was abandoned in 1970 because Soviet leaders feared it would undermine their control over the economy and country.

CompuServe launched the first consumer internet service on September 24, 1979. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates.

In 1983 the ARPANET officially changed its core networking protocols from NCP to TCP/IP, marking the beginning of the Internet.

The Internet's Domain Name System was created in 1985. The first domain ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.  It was registered by the Symbolics Computer Corporation in Massachusetts. The symbolics.com domain was purchased by XF.com in 2009.

France had a "proto-internet" called Minitel during the 1980s. A computer network open to anyone with a telephone half the population had access to it. It allowed for buying airplane tickets, shopping, 24-hr news, message boards and adult chat services. It was used to coordinate a national strike in 1986. Some believe it hindered the internet's adoption in France.

The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, was launched from MIT in 1988.

While working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), near Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, a publicly available service on the Internet on August 6, 1991. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, although new users could only access it after August 23rd.

WorldWideWeb, c. 1993

Back in 1992, the whole internet used to be on a floppy disk which Tim  Berners-Lee used to demo it to others. The disk is now lost.

The first recorded use of 'surfing' as a mode of using the internet is attributed to internet pioneer Mark McCahill, who used the phrase in February 1992.

The term was popularized a few months later by the upstate New York librarian Jean Armour Polly, aka “Net Mom."  Polly was the author of an article called "Surfing the INTERNET", published in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin in June, 1992.

The internet's first uploaded image of a band (see below) was of the joke group Les Horribles Cernettes (LHC), an all-girl group comprised of girlfriends and assistants of CERN employees . The initials of their name are the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider, which was later built at CERN. Their photo was uploaded on July 18, 1992. 

Wikipedia

Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. The search site lasted for about three years before more modernized search engines began appearing.

In 1993 CERN announced World Wide Web protocols would be free.

In December 1993 there were just 623 websites on the internet.

WXYC, the student radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provided the world's first internet radio broadcast in 1994.

It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, TV 13 years, and the Internet just four years.

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, predicted in 1995 that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" the next year, promising to eat his words if it did not.  In 1997, he put his article in a blender and drank it at the International World Wide Web Conference.

Also in 1995 Newsweek published an article berating the internet and calling visions about its future "baloney". It predicted that "no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

David Bowie's "Telling Lies" was released on his website in 1996, the first single by a major recording artist released exclusively on the Internet. Over 300,000 people downloaded the original Internet-only release.

In Britain, Tesco became the first supermarket in 1996 to offer Internet shopping and within a few years, housewives all over the world could buy groceries without ever leaving their homes.

The first person to stream their life on the internet was 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley aka Jennicam, who from 1996, broadcasted her life from her college dorm room 24/7. At its peak, she got 7 million hits per day, a significant proportion of the internet at the time.

On April 25, 1997, a significant disruption of the internet occurred due to a faulty router operated by MAI Network Services in Florida. The router mistakenly leaked a large amount of its routing table to the Internet, causing a routing black hole. The outage lasted for several hours and affected millions of users worldwide. It was one of the first major internet blackouts, and it served as a wake-up call for the internet community to develop better network protocols and address the issue of routing table leaks.

The first recorded use of the term 'silver surfer' for an over-50 browsing the internet was in 1997.

in 1997 Pope John Paul II nominated St. Isidore of Seville to be the patron saint of the Internet. She was a seventh-century theologian and encyclopedist who tried to record everything ever known.

The number of worldwide Internet users increased 566% between 2000 and 2012.

In 2010, Finland became the first country to make Internet access a legal right. A year later, the United Nations declared Internet access a human right, and disconnecting people from it is against international law.

100% of Iceland's population has the internet, the only country in the world.

FUN FACTS

Every minute 345 new internet virus threats are released — or almost six a second.

It is estimated that it would take 400 billion trees to print out the Internet.

It would take 136 billion sheets of A4 paper to print out the entire internet.

Internet speed is measured in Megabits, not Megabytes. Bytes hold 8 bits, thus making an internet speed of 100megabits/s actually only 12.5 megabytes/s.

There are sen primary keyholders of the Internet. Each keyholder is chosen for their geographical spread and Internet security background to ensure that no one country has more keyholders. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web. The keyholders are a last resort option in case something catastrophic happens to the world's Internet.

Indian billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani has invested over $30 Billion to improve India's mobile and internet infrastructures since 2011, when his daughter, who was back home from Yale for holiday and tried to submit her coursework, told him that "the internet in our house sucks".

The largest Internet café is ChamsCity Digital Mall in Abuja, Nigeria, offering 1,027 computer terminals.

One third of all internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia passes through a single skyscraper in Downtown Los Angeles, where 260 ISPs lease space for interconnected networks.

54.9% of the Internet is in English, 5.9% is in Russian, 5.7% is in German, 5% is in Japanese, and 4.6% is in Spanish.