21 Facts About The Internet You Should Know

You probably use it every day but how well do you 
know your Internet?

Ever wonder how all this foolishness got started in the 
first place and why? How big it really is? How many present 
users there are? The average time spent on a website? 
Here are 21 facts you might or might not want to know 
about the Internet.


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. 


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 thru 
DARPA,(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1962. 
Later he would help form ARPANET and the Internet was on it's 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.

11. 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.  


12. 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. Source: 
CyberAtlas.com 


13. 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. 


14. Country with the highest percentage of net users? 

Sweden at 75%.


15. 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
rapidily. 


16. 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.


17. Who coined the phrase 'The Web might be better than sex'?

Bob Metcalfe in 1995.


18. 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.


19. What is an ISP?

Internet Service Provider - This is the service or company you use to 
access the Internet.  

20. What is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language - it's the coded format language for 
transmitting and creating hypertext web pages. 


21. 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.


One last thought - Henry Edward Hardy in his Master's Thesis (1993) on 
The History of the Net stated "The Net is Immortal". Ever wonder what 
this baby will be like in a 100 years? a 1000 years? Just something
to think about as you keep your eye on that cursor.