6.1 10 Facts about the Internet that you should know

1. Who coined the phrase 'World Wide Web'?
Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. He's also considered by most people as the person who started the whole thing rolling. He's also the guy who stopped anybody from owning it by making it 'royalty free'.

2. How did the Internet Start and Why?
It all started with the time-sharing of IBM computers in the early 1960s at universities such as Dartmouth and Berkeley in the States. People would share the same computer for their computing tasks. The Internet also received help from Sputnik!
After this Russian Satellite was launched in 1957, President Eisenhower formed ARPA to advance computer networking and communication.

3. Who was J.C.R. Licklider?
Licklider is often referred to as the father of the Internet because his ideas of interactive computing and a "Galactic Network" were the seeds for the Internet. His ideas would be developed through DARPA,(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1962.
Later he would help form ARPANET and the Internet was on its way.
Vinton Gray Cerf was another founding father of the Internet. He played a key role in the creation of the Net by developing the TCP/IP protocols we use for the Internet.

4. What was ARPANET?
ARPANET stands for 'Advanced Research Projects Agency Network' Came about in the arena of Sputnik and the cold war. The military needed a method of communicating and sharing all the information on computers for research and development. It would also be a handy communication system if all traditional ways were wiped out in a nuclear attack!

5. What was the First long distance Connection?
In 1965 using a low speed dial-up telephone line, MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts working with Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California. The phone lines weren't quite up to the task!

6. Who was Leonard Kleinrock?
Kleinrock came up with the theory of packet switching, the basic form of Internet connections. With a group of UCLA graduate students on Oct. 29, 1969, Kleinrock connected with the Stanford Research Institute but as they typed in the G in LOGIN -- the system crashed!

7. What is an Ethernet?
It's a protocol or system for a set of computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs), the origins of which came from Bob Metcalfe's Harvard's dissertation on "Packet Networks."

8. When was the first mouse introduced?
The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart at the Fall Joint Computer Expo in San Francisco.

9. Did Al Gore really invent the Internet?
No, but give credit where credit is due. He did the most of any elected official to actively promote the Internet. However, he wasn't even in Congress when ARPANET was formed in 1969 or even when the term 'Internet' came into use in 1974. Gore was first elected in 1976.
Gore himself may be the cause of this Urban Legend or Internet myth - during a Wolf Blitzer CNN interview on March 9, 1999 - Al Gore did say: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Causing himself some ridicule but also paving the way for such future one-liners as: "I invented the environment!"

10. Who coined the phrase 'information superhighway'?
Wikipedia says Nam June Paik coined the phrase "information superhighway" in 1974.
Al Gore popularized the phrase in the early 1990's.

6.2 10 More facts about the internet that you should know

1. Which decade really saw the explosion of the net?
The 1990s. The Internet exploded into the mainstream with the release of the first popular web browser Mosaic in 1993.

2. How fast is the Internet growing?
Very fast! It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet.

3. Number of Internet Users and Breakdown.
The Internet is roughly 35% English, 65% Non-English with the Chinese at 14%. Yet only 13% of world's population, 812 million are Internet users as of Dec. '04. North America has the highest continental concentration with 70% of the people using the Internet.

4. Country with the highest percentage of net users?
Sweden at 75%.

5. How big is the Internet's surfing world?
Google's index now stands at over 8 billion pages. There are now over a Billion Internet Users and that number is growing rapidly.

6. What was the Net's first index called?
Archie, other than library catalogs, this was the first index created in 1989 by Peter Deutsch at McGill in Montreal.
Although it spouted such others as Veronica and Jughead, Archie was short for Archiver and had nothing to do with the comic strip.
Backrub was the original name for Google! Larry Page and Sergey Brin used this term for their search engine in 1996, Google as we know it debuted in 1998. The name Google is a twist on the word Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

7. What does HTTP stand for?
HyperText Transfer Protocol - it's the protocol for moving files across the net; it requires two client programs. The HTTP client and the server.

8. What is an ISP?
Internet Service Provider - This is the service or company you use to access the Internet.

9. What is HTML?
Hypertext Markup Language - it's the coded format language for transmitting and creating hypertext web pages.

10. What are your average surfing habits according to Nielsen NetRatings?
Each month you usually visit 59 domains, view 1,050 pages allocating 45 seconds for each page and spend about 25 hours doing all this net activity! Each surfing session lasts 51 minutes.

6.3 Random Facts

  1. The state of Nevada provides wireless internet to all of its residents for free
  2. eBay was formed from Pierre Omiyar's efforts to find a broader market for his wife's collection of Pez dispensers
  3. When forwarding mail to a large group, internet courtesy suggests that you put their contacts under bcc, not cc
  4. In 1993, 4.6 million people used the internet worldwide - by 2009 that figure was up to 1.5 billion - that one person in every 5 in the world.
  5. There are still 18 countries in the world that have no internet access
  6. 40% of internet users are Asian
  7. The most common 'How to' search on Google is 'How to commit suicide'.
  8. The 3 most popular websites in the world are: 1. Yahoo; 2. MSN; 3. Google
  9. The first popular web browser was called Mosaic and was released in 1993.
  10. There are over 1 billion Internet users worldwide; that's 20% of the world's population.

6.4 Internet Trivia

  1. The English version of Wikipedia has more than 2.3 million articles. Over one third of US adults consult Wikipedia.
  2. In January, 2009, the average user spent 10% of all his/her online minutes on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
  3. Social networking is the fastest growing part of the Internet. There are 70 million active users on Facebook (the 8th most popular site in the world), and more than 14 million photos are uploaded daily.
  4. In 2008, the United States spent $214.4 billion online. Internet purchasing is increasing at a rate of 7 percent per year.
  5. Technorati tracks over 133 million blogs on the Internet.
  6. One in five of the world's Internet users visits YouTube each day.
  7. Nielsen NetRatings indicates that the average Internet user, in one month, will visit 59 domains, view 1,050 pages (allocating 45 seconds for each page) and will spend about 25 hours doing all this net activity! Each surfing session lasts 51 minutes.
  8. Until the introduction of Internet Explorer 4, 90% of all web surfers used Netscape as their browser.

6.5 More Internet Trivia

  1. We all know the joke that pornography infests every part of the internet, but did you know one third of all search engine queries are specifically for porn? Think about it, for every two times you search for something on the internet there is someone out there who looks for porn!
  2. Think of yourself as a pioneer of technology because you started using email back in 1996? This guy sent the first email in 1971, that's almost forty years ago! Ray Tomlinson displayed a system he worked on, CPYNET, to read and write files on remote computers. His exact message no longer exists, but we do know it give instructions on how to use the "@" symbol!
  3. Think spam email has really been a problem the last few years? Spam has actually been around for thirty years now! In the late 1970s a company called DEC and a marketer ahead of his time used the directory of ARPANET, the precursor to the current internet, to announce the release of a new DEC computer with ARPANET capabilities. Over 600 people received this spam and it's poor reception pushed back commercial mass emailing on the backburner for many years!
  4. The most expensive item ever sold on eBay was a 405-foot, steel mega-yacht, called Gigayacht. The yacht was offered up for auction on eBay November 3rd, 2006 with a "buy now" price of $85 million. It was bought by Russian tycoon Roman Abramovic . Amazingly the $85 mill was only a 50% down payment.
  5. If a program offers to scan your computer for viruses for free - BEWARE - unless it's a reputable company, this may be malware which will infect your computer. DO a bit of research on the company first.

6.6 Domain Names

  1. The oldest domain name in the world is SYMBOLICS.com which was registered on March 15th 1986.
  2. Every possible 2 or 3 letter domain name is already taken.
  3. 70% of all domain names are registered through GoDaddy.com
  4. The most expensive domain name in the world is insure.com which sold last year for $16.5 million. The other 9 most expensive are: sex.com; fund.com; porn.com; business.com; diamond.com; beer.com; Israel.com; casino.com and toys.com

6.7 Most Popular on The Internet

  1. The 3 most popular websites in the world are: 1. Yahoo; 2. MSN; 3. Google
  2. The most popular blog in the net is the technology based BoingBoing.net, with over 1 million views per day. This is followed by news blog Fark.com and the right wing political blog Instapundit.com
  3. Google is by far the most popular search enginein the world with 50% of the market or 2.5 billion queries a month, then come Yahoo, MSN and AOL
  4. The most popular video on YouTube is Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' with over 230 million view. This is followed by Justin Beiber's 'Baby' and 'Charlie bit my finger again'.
  5. Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site, having overtaken MySpace in 2008.
  6. The most popular Twitter Account is Ashton Kutcher with over 1 million followers. He's followed by CNN's breaking news in second and Oprah Winfrey in third.
  7. There's a tie for top email service with Yahoo and Hotmail both having 250 million accounts - Google's Gmail is a distant third with 90 million
  8. The most Googled person of all time is Michael Jackson, while the most Googled woman is Britney Spears.
  9. 9/11 is the most searched for event and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is by far the most Googled sporting event in history.
  10. The world's most popular sports website is bbc.com/sport. The BBC is also the most popular news site in the world.