20 Awesome Facts About the Internet Worth Knowing

Who is not dependent on Internet connection today? Millennials will definitely go berserk if the Internet suddenly stops its service. The Internet affects all sectors of society and we cannot laud enough how vital the Internet is to individuals and industries from developed, developing and emerging countries. Even smaller countries look to the Internet to communicate and catch up with the rest of the world.

Such is the importance of the Internet in the lives of people these days, that it was given its own special day to honor how its inception changed the history of technology and telecommunications.

Each step of its development and use was a momentous occasion. Its special day celebrates the first time an electronic message was sent in 1969 when a message from California was sent from one computer to another. The Internet serves as a liberating tool, as it allows everyone to have an equal advantage and opportunity to share its services to connect worldwide.

Would you believe that the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web coincided with the celebration of Woodstock in August 1969? It’s possible that only the baby-boomers recall the date.

The Internet’s history

The initial concept of the Internet was conceived by the futuristic mind of MIT’s Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (also known as J.C.R. Licklider), an American psychologist and computer scientist. This was shown in the memos he wrote in 1962 to discuss a Galactic Network. He dreamt of a set of computers that are globally connected so that every person could immediately access programs and data from any location. At that time, he was the head of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). His networking idea was the predecessor of the Internet.

The birth of the Internet underwent a series of failures and successes. For years the researchers were unsuccessful in their attempts to have digital data visible to every person through means other than using teleprinters and other equipment. The initial stage of research was called ARPANET, which stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network of the U.S. Department of Defense.

It took seven years after Licklider conceived the idea of a worldwide networking system, until Charley Kline, a UCLA computer programming student, successfully sent the first message in 1969. The message was sent from Kline’s computer at UCLA to a computer located at the Stanford Research Institute, where Bill Duvall received the message.

Before the historical message was sent over the Internet, another computer scientist who made tremendous contributions to the development of the Internet was Leonard Kleinrock, who wrote the mathematical theory behind packet switching and computer networking’s theoretical foundations. He supervised the transmission of the first message over the Internet.

The transmission was a success but it was not a full success. The message was ”login” but only the letters L and the O were sent because of the collapse of the system and the crash of the transmission. But the researchers were not daunted by the project because they had already envisioned the huge potential of the network. Like the majority of the users, it would be difficult to understand the entire development process of the Internet. What people can do is to give thanks to those visionaries and computer programmers who worked hard for several years to bring us one of the greatest and most useful communication tools.

Moreover, it’s amazing to know that there are so many awesome facts about the Internet, which we are going to learn today. So here goes…

Awesome facts about the Internet

Get ready to have your mind tickled for you can add these facts to your chest of knowledge. The Internet is available in almost all parts of the globe although the speed and stability of the connection may vary. It has become one of life’s most essential components and many users cannot spend the day without connecting to it, because, let’s face it, the Internet does make life easier for most people.

1. In 2010, five million terabytes of data comprised the Internet, according to Google. But the popular search engine also said that they have only indexed 0.004% of the Internet’s content.
2. As of October 2018, the Internet consisted of around 4.46 billion pages and over 1.9 billion websites. Ready for more? In the same month, the Internet had 75.8 million business and blog sites uploaded on WordPress and 411 million blogs on Tumblr. Each day, the Internet receives a publication of 5 million blog posts. Sadly, about 85,000 sites are hacked each day.
3. Each day, about 95 million photos are posted on one of Internet users’ favorite photo sharing sites, Instagram, but only about 30% of these images are seen.
4. In 2016, people connected to the Internet used not just terabytes, but one zettabyte bandwidth! And get this; a zettabyte is equivalent to 1 sextillion bytes (that includes a lot of zeros – a total of 21 zeros). It is also equivalent to 1 trillion gigabytes, a billion terabytes or 1 thousand exabytes.
5. Cisco estimates that 82% of overall IP traffic will consist of videos in 2021.
6. The estimated world population is 7 billion (2017) and get this – 4 billion people were connected to the Internet as of October 2018. About 1.7 billion users are from Asia.
7. Every hour, the Internet receives registration of around 5,000 domains, equivalent to 120,000 domains daily or 43 million annually. It is ironic that despite the numbers, about 75% of the domains remain parked, which prevents people from using some domain names.
8. Top favorite social media site, Facebook reported that 2.234 billion people use their site. The number represents about one-third of the population across the globe.
9. Do you ever wonder when the first email was transmitted? Wonder no more – it was in 1971. The email system’s inventor, Ray Tomlinson, who was a computer programmer, sent it to one other person. Today, emails sent each day amount to about 250 billion, but 81% of them (or 200 billion) are spam emails. An ad for Digital Equipment Corporation presentation was the first spam email sent to 600 recipients in 1978.
10. Would you believe that the first website ever created is still alive? The basic HTML site’s URL is http://info.cern.ch. Check it if you do not believe this entry.
11. The first name of Twitter was Twttr. Initially, it was a social networking site based on SMS so the character limit was 140. The limit is now up to 240 characters. On March 21, 2006. Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, uploaded the world’s first tweet.
12. The fat orange tabby cat cartoon character named Garfield used to offer his own email service. It was called G-mail.com. It was later acquired by Google and retained the name of the email service (GMail.com), replacing Garfield with Google.
13. On YouTube, every minute equates to 400 hours of uploaded video content. That’s 24,000 hours of video every single hour. How many videos can you watch on YouTube every hour?
14. The Apple App Store and Google Play have a combined app content that reaches 4.9 million. The Apple App Store received 25 billion downloads while 75 billion downloads were reported by Google for 2016.
15. The first 50 million users of the Internet were reached within four years of its launch. Compare that to the 39 years it took for radio to reach that many numbers of consumers. Television only waited for 13 years.
16. Now, this is truly one of the awesome facts about the Internet – the Internet is controlled by only seven people. They work for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Each person holds a different key. Their function is to ensure the secure and stable operation of the Internet. They can restore the Internet in case of a major catastrophe. The global Internet community is a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles, California.
17. In China, the majority of people (about 200 million) who use the Internet are between 15 and 35 years of age. Due to their age, most of them become addicted to the network. It prompted the county to establish treatment camps specializing in people addicted to the Internet.
18. In its current state, 50 million horsepower is needed to keep the Internet running. In 2005, the maximum speed of broadband Internet was only 2 megabits per second (Mbps). Today, the average broadband speed in South Korea is 28.6 Mbps, 23.5 Mbps in Norway, 22.5 Mbps in Sweden, 21.9 Mbps in Hong Kong and 21.7 Mbps in Switzerland. In contrast, only 8.4 Mbps is the average Internet speed in the United States.
19. It’s surprising to know that about one-third of the Italian population and 9 million adult people in Britain have never used the Internet.
20. Do you actually realize that the World Wide Web (or the web) and the Internet are two different things? The web acts as a bridge to access and share information. The Internet is a network of millions of computers.

We hope that you are as fascinated as us about these snippets of knowledge and these awesome facts about the Internet. It is one of the most valuable inventions that have a global reach.

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