You probably use it every day, but how well does it do it?
Do you know your Internet?
Have you ever wondered how all this nonsense started in the
first place and why? How big is it really? how many presents
users are there? The average time spent on a website?
Here are 21 facts you may or may not want to know.
over the internet
1. Who coined the phrase ‘World Wide Web’?
Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. He is also considered by most
people like the person who started it all rolling.
2. How did the Internet start and why?
It all started with the time sharing of IBM computers in the early
60’s at universities such as Dartmouth and Berkeley in the United States.
People would share the same computer for their computing tasks.
The Internet also got help from Sputnik! After this Russian satellite
it was released in 1957; President Eisenhower formed ARPA to advance
communication and computer networks.
3. Who was JCR 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 of the Internet. His ideas would develop through
DARPA, (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1962.
It would later help form the ARPANET, and the Internet was on its way.
4. What was the ARPANET?
ARPANET stands for ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network’
It emerged in the arena of Sputnik and the cold war. The military
needed a method to communicate and share all the information about
computers for research and development. It would also be useful
communication system if all traditional forms were eliminated 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. Phone lines were not up to par.
6. Who was Leonard Kleinrock?
Kleinrock devised the theory of packet switching,
the basic form of Internet connections. with a group
of graduating students from UCLA on October 29, 1969, Kleinrock
connected with the Stanford Research Institute, but as
they typed the G in LOGIN – the system crashed!
7. What is an Ethernet?
It is a protocol or standards for a set of computer networks.
technologies for local area networks (LAN), the origins
which came from Bob Metcalfe’s Harvard dissertation
in “Packet networks”.
8. When was the first mouse introduced?
The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968 by
Douglas Engelbart at the Joint Fall Computer Show
in San Francisco.
9. Did Al Gore really invent the Internet?
Nope, but gives credit where credit is due. did most of
any elected official to actively promote the Internet. Nevertheless,
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 said: “During my service in the
United States Congress, I took the initiative to create
The Internet.”
causing something ridiculous but also paving the way for
witty phrases from the future like: “I invented the environment!”
10. Who coined the phrase ‘information highway’?
Wikipedia says that Nam June Paik coined the phrase “information
superhighway” in 1974.
Al Gore popularized the phrase in the early 1990s.
11. What decade really saw the explosion of the network?
The 1990s The Internet broke into the mainstream with the
Release of the first popular Mosaic web browser in 1993.
12. How fast is the Internet growing?
Very fast! Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users,
13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet. Font:
cyberatlas.com
13. Number of Internet Users and Breakdown.
The Internet is about 35% English, 65% non-English with
the Chinese at 14%. However, only 13% of the world’s population,
812 million are Internet users as of December 2004. North America
It has the highest continental concentration with 70% of the
people who use the Internet.
14. Country with the highest percentage of Internet users?
Sweden at 75%.
15. How big is the Internet browsing world?
Google’s index now stands at 8 billion pages.
16. What was the name of the first index of the Network?
Archie, other than the library catalogs, this was the first
index created in 1989 by Peter Deutsch at McGill in Montreal.
Although he released others like Veronica and Jughead, Archie
was short for Archiver and had nothing to do with the
comic strip.
Backrub was the original name of Google. Larry Page and Sergey
Brin used this term for his search engine in 1996, Google Like Us
I know it started in 1998. The name Google is a twist on the word
Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.
17. Who coined the phrase “The Web could be better than sex”?
Bob Metcalfe in 1995.
18. What does HTTP stand for?
Hypertext Transfer Protocol: It is the protocol used to transfer
content over the network; requires two client programs. The HTTP client
and the server.
19. What is an ISP?
Internet Service Provider: This is the service or company you use to
Internet access.
20. What is HTML?
Hypertext Markup Language is the encoded formatting language for
transmit and create hypertext web pages.
21. What are your average browsing habits according to Nielsen?
Net Ratings?
Every month you usually visit 59 domains, see 1,050 pages assigning 45
seconds per page and spend about 25 hours doing all this net activity.
Each surf session lasts 51 minutes.
One last thought: Henry Edward Hardy in his master’s thesis (1993) on
The History of the Network said “The Network is Immortal”. Have you ever wondered what?
Will this baby be like 100 years from now? at 1000 years? Just something
what to think about while keeping your eyes on that cursor.
Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins
