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10 Crazy Facts From Internet History
When you think of the "World Wide Web," you likely imagine a sprawling network of computers circling the globe, blasting information to each other 24 hours a day.
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And you'd be right, though this wasn't always the case.
When he first invented it in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee kept the entire World Wide Web (which was still rather small for a time) on his NeXTcube from NeXT, the company started by Steve Jobs after being ousted from Apple.
This is of course but one example from the Internet's unusual history. We have nine more for you.
Google literally had to buy the Gmail domain from Garfield.
Google enlists the help of software to scan the volumes of video footage uploaded to YouTube every day to ensure that intellectual property stays protected. We can only imagine what a timesaver that must be compared to humans doing the same task.
Because what's worse than walking down the hall to fill your caffeine craving only to discover an empty coffee pot?
Beginning in 1991, Cambridge University successfully implemented the first webcam on its own local network. Its sole purpose was to monitor a coffee pot to see how much coffee was left.
In 1974, the word "internet" first appeared in the "Internet Transmission Control Program" booklet as a shortening of the term "internetworking" or "inter-system networking."
It wasn't until 1992, when Congress passed the Scientific Advanced Technology Act, that commercial interests were allowed online. This included everything from paying for your Internet service provider to buying something from an online marketplace.
It's thought that this law is what jump-started the Internet into the behemoth it is today.
A blessing or a curse? If the Internet is a giant collection of the world's information, then part of that information exists specifically to teach you how to kill yourself.
The dynamics of romance are changing, and have been rapidly. When you can effectively quantify and attempt to objectively examine people's compatibility with each other, it only makes sense that they'll take to it as a means of finding a mate.
People's interests seem to be a bit primal when it comes to their online activity.
About one-third of all Internet searches are for pornography and at any given moment, there are approximately 28,000 people watching X-rated videos online.
The Telegraph reports on the 2006 Justice Department's hiring of statistician Philip B. Stark to determine how much Internet content was adult-centered and otherwise sexually explicit.
According to his findings, only "1.1 % of the websites indexed by Google and MSN" could be considered as belonging to that category.
Tim Berners-Lee invented what became the World Wide Web in 1989. It had to go somewhere, so for a while, the whole thing lived on his Next computer.
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