97 Surprising Facts About The Internet | Legacy Facts

# In 1992 an upstate New York librarian Jean Armour Polly, aka "Net Mom," coined the word "surfing" the internet.

# Queen Elizabeth knighted the inventor of the modern world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee.

# The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee has one regret: the double slash "//" in URLs. He thinks that was unnecessary.

# On 6th August 1991 the first website went online. Berners-Lee and his fellow members of the CERN team launched http://info.cern.ch, with a landing page containing just 153 words.

# Ethernet – the most commonly used wired Internet – was invented by Bob Metcalfe almost half a century ago in the early 1970s.

# The first webcam was used at Cambridge University. Its purpose was to monitor a coffee maker so that trips to an empty pot didn't go waste.

# A comedy band was the first photo ever uploaded to the internet. The group, called "Les Horribles Cernettes," were colleagues with the inventor of World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

# Steve Wilke, an engineer at Compuserve, invented the GIF format in 1987.

# Mr. Wilhite mentions the correct pronunciation of GIF as "jiff."

# The term "Fi" in "WiFi" does not mean anything. This was called because it rhymed with "HiFi."

# On 21 March 2006, the very first tweet was posted by Jack Dorsey.

# Original Facebook profile number ID for Mark Zuckerberg is 4.

# Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail to himself in 1971.

# A guy named Gary Thuerk sent the first spam email over ARPNET in 1978. He was selling computers.

# The First YouTube Video was uploaded in April 2005, featuring its co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.

# Avicii's "Wake Me Up" is the most played song on Spotify.

# Minecraft official updates page is the most popular Tumblr.

# The Amazon logo indicates that you can get everything from A to Z (look at the arrow).

# In July 1995, Amazon.com sold their first book: "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies."

# Around 1971, a bag of marijuana was the first thing ever purchased and sold over the Internet.

# Stanford students buying marijuana from students at MIT became the first online transaction ever.

# Earl Wild, the first person to play the piano on U.S. TV was also the first person to stream a performance 58 years later on the internet.

# The original Website of Space Jam is still alive.

# Before the Internet, "LOL" used to mean "lots of love."

# The first domain that was registered was symbolics.com.

# "Brickipedia" is the online encyclopedia dedicated to Lego.

# In Japanese, "emoji" is literally "image character," since "e" can be translated to "image," and "Moji" can be translated to "character."

# The man who invented pop-up ads has apologized for creating one of the most hated forms of advertising on the internet.

# The browser names like Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are well known to us all. But Mosiac was considered to be the very first and popular web browser that started its services in 1993 and was a big part of the internet until 1997.

# The entire Internet was made up of only 42 computers in 1973.

# By the end of 1993 the World Wide Web had just 623 websites.

# Google ranks as the world's most popular website, with Youtube coming in second and Facebook third.

# Only 0.03 percent of the Internet can be accessed by search engines. The remaining is called the "deep web."

# Most Internet traffic isn't generated by people but by bots like Google and Malware.

# Video accounts for around 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2020.

# Netflix accounts for 15 percent of worldwide Internet traffic.

# A single Google query requires 1,000 computers to produce an answer in 0.2 seconds.

# 37 percent of the web is porn.

# The internet is not used by 15 percent of American adults.

# In Britain, nine million adults have never used the internet.

# One-third of Italians have never used the Internet.

# Only 37.9 percent of people have Internet access once a year or more.

# Six percent of the world population is addicted to the Internet.

# "Mouse potato" is someone who spends a tremendous amount of time on a computer.

# There are more than 3.5 billion searches on Google every day.

# Every day, 16 percent to 20 percent of the searches that occur are the ones that Google has never seen before.

# More than 3 in 4 U.S. workers use social media at work, even if they are banned from using it.

# The average person spends nearly 10 hours a day online now–we spend more time on the internet than we do in sleep.

# 50 percent of Internet users will quit waiting for a video to load after ten seconds.

# The most commonly searched question beginning with "What is" was "What is twerking?" in 2013.

# More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

# Every day, 500 million tweets are sent.

# Online dating generates about $2.2 billion annually.

# The company had only 13 employees when Facebook acquired Instagram for around $1 billion.

# Before coming up with the social network Snapchat founders had tried almost 34 projects.

# The mascot of Snapchat has a name: Chillah Ghostface.

# Netflix was longer around than Google.

# Every month, porn websites attract more visitors than Amazon, Netflix and Twitter combined.

# For Google AdWords the most expensive keyword is "insurance."

# Users of the Internet send 204 Million Emails every minute.

# Of all emails sent, 70 percent are spam.

# WordPress, the website's most widely known content management system (CMS), powers around 63 million blogs.

# WordPress, the open-source content management system, powers 35 percent of all websites on the Internet.

# There were 1,744,517,326 websites as of January 1st, 2020, up from 906,616,188 in January 2016.

# Every day, more than 100,000 new dot com domains are registered on the web.

# Every minute, over 570 new websites are created.

# At least 1 in every 10,000 people who live today have a Wikipedia article about them.

# Thirty thousand websites are hacked daily.

# The popular Oscar selfie of Ellen DeGeneres has been retweeted 3.3 million times.

# If the Internet went down for a day, it would have to wait for 196 billion emails and 3 billion Google searches.

# North Korea accidentally leaked its DNS data in 2016, revealing that it has just 28 ".kp" domains. There are ten million ".uk" domains, by comparison.

# Since its establishment in 1996, the current library at Alexandria has a copy of all web pages on each website on the Internet.

# The 1989 article suggesting the acronym LOL also proposed that using "H" to mean "Huh?"

# Disconnecting people from the Internet is a violation of human rights according to the UN.

# In case of a catastrophic event, seven individuals have keys with the power to restart the World Wide Web.

# The fastest time in the world record for log into a Gmail account is 1.16 seconds.

# A Brazilian teenager holds the world record for the fastest texture.

# The Internet connection of NASA is 13,000 times faster than the average user of the United States, at 91 gigabits per second.

# Researchers are debating on adding Internet addiction to the list of mental disorders.

# A research showed that people who spend more time on the internet are more likely to be depressed, lonely, and mentally unstable.

# Psychologists researched on Internet trolls and found that they are "narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic."

# Indiana University was given $1 million by the U.S. government to study memes.

# The kid from the "Success Kid" meme made enough money to fund his father's kidney transplant, thanks to his Internet popularity.

# In 2005, Estonia became the first country to hold legally binding general elections over the Internet.

# Estonian ID cards have a public-private key pair chip that is used to sign documents and vote over the internet during elections. 24 percent of the votes were cast online for their 2011 election.

# In 2010, Finland became the world's first nation to make Internet access a legal right.

# In 1997, St. Isidore of Seville was decided by Pope John Paul II to be the patron saint of the Internet and computer repairmen.

# India has more Internet users than the entire US population.

# In 2018, Montana was the first State to mandate net neutrality.

# In Southeast Asia, the Philippines has the slowest Internet speed: 3.54 Mbps.

# China has more smartphone internet users than it does on PCs.

# 1 In 10 Americans think that HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, the language of the web pages.

# When Montenegro became independent from Yugoslavia, the domain name on the Internet went from .yu to.me.

# On the way up to Mount Everest there is high-speed Internet.

# China has internet-addict treatment camps.

# UK's Internet porn filter architect was arrested in 2014 on child porn Offences.

# A U.S. journalist was sentenced to five years in prison in 2015, for posting a link on the internet.

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