Today we reveal some of the history of the web in addition to another set of mind-blowing figures. We attempt to put these into context, but as with everything internet-related - it's not always easy! The web continues to grow at a rate that is impossible to comprehend.
1. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet.
2. The first ‘index’ of the web was called Archie, created in 1989 by Peter Deutsch at McGill in Montreal. It soon spawned others such as Veronica and Jughead. Archie was short for Archiver.
3. Google was originally to be called Backrub. 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.
4. There are approximately 210 billion e-mails sent every day. That equates to 31 for every person on the planet!
5. Almost 54 trillion spam e-mails are sent every year. That equates to every person on earth receiving approximately 22 spam e-mails a day.
6. As of December 2008, there were over 186 million websites on the internet. This had grown by 31 million in a year, meaning that, on average, almost 85,000 new websites appear online every single day of the year.
7. If you tried to visit just the new websites that appeared in a single day, and visiting each new site took you 5 seconds, you’d have to stay at your PC for 5 solid days, without sleep.
8. There are over 135 million blogs online.
9. There are approximately 1 million viruses or malicious pieces of code on the internet.
10. J. C. R. Licklider is often referred to as the original 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,(Defence 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
11. There are almost 1 million new blog posts made every day.
12. ARPANET stands for 'Advanced Research Projects Agency Network'. It evolved during the cold war when the American military needed a method of communicating and sharing all the information on computers for research and development.
13. The first inter-connection of any real note was in 1965, using a low speed dial-up telephone line, when MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, working with Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California.
14. Leonard Kleinrock came up with the theory of packet switching, the basic form of Internet connections. With a group of UCLA graduate students on October 29th, 1969, Kleinrock connected with the Stanford Research Institute but as they typed in the G in LOGIN…the system crashed.
15. The average length of a video on the internet is 3 minutes and 6 seconds.
The growth rate of the internet can't really be captured in statistics alone. However, as we reveal, with over 30 million new websites added in the last year - it is expanding faster than ever before.
If the current rate continues, there will be over half a billion websites online in 4 years. Consider that - that is websites - not individual web pages. Will it plateau? It's unlikely to happen as more and more devices begin to harness communication technologies and mobile devices benefit from high speed connections.
If you look at the split of internet users across the globe, it gives equally interesting reading.
Over 500 million users come from Asia, by far the biggest user base. Europeans come second with 384 million of them online ahead of North America with 250 million. Think about that - there are twice the number of internet users in Asia than there are in the United States. The technology has spread, information is spreading with it and you can be assured the web is going to play a collosal part in the economic surge from Asia (it already is, we know, but the curve is going to become much steeper).
If the world feels much smaller today than it did 20 years ago - it is going to become a whole lot smaller. International trade online hasn't reached the levels we thought it might have done by now, but in 5 years time you can expect users to consider a much wider marketplace. If more of continental Asia begins to target a European and American internet user the impact on the economies of those areas will see a radical downturn - just what you wanted to hear in the middle of a recession!
