95 Amazing Facts about Internet & Technology

Note: The information in this article dates back to 2009.

1. The English once took it to be an alphabet. The Chinese affectionately term it ’the little mouse’. The Dutch call it an ’elephant’s trunk’, the Germans a spider monkey, the Italians as a snail. It is ’&’ (ampersand).
2. The inspiration for the brand name Yahoo! Came from a word made up by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo was a person who was ugly and not a human in appearance.
3. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know the HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, the submit button was a later addition, and initially, hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
4. Sweden has the highest percentage of its population i.e. 76.9 percent hooked on to the Internet. In contrast, the world average is 11.9 percent and India has a poor 7.2 percent.
5. The Dilbert Zone was the first comic website on the Internet.
6. A resident of Tonga could have the right to register domains ending in .to as Tongo’s Internet code is .to. Such possibilities are fun to consider: travel.to or go.to.
7. The day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a few Microsoft employees left a 10 by 12-foot Internet Explorer logo on Netscape’s front lawn with a message that said “We love you” at the height of the browser wars in the late 90’s.
8. The world ’e-mail’ has been banned by the French Ministry of culture. They are required to use the word ’Courriel’ instead, which is the French equivalent of the Internet. This move became the subject of ridicule from the cyber community in general.
9. Did you know that www.symbolics.com was the first ever domain name registered online?
10. According to a University of Minnesota report, researchers estimate the volume of Internet traffic is growing at an annual rate of 50 to 60 percent.
11. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.
12. In February 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 percent several times more than Facebook.
13. The first graphical Web browser to become truly popular was Marc Andresen and Jamie Zawinski’s NCSA Mosaic. It was the first browser made available for Windows, Mac, and Unix X Windows System with the first version appearing in MARCH 1993.
14. The cost of transmitting information has fallen dramatically. A trillion bits of information from Boston to Los Angeles from $150,000 in 1970 to 12 cents today. E-mailing a 40-page document from Chile to Kenya costs less than 10 cents, faxing it about $10, sending it by courier $50.
15. The typical Internet user worldwide is young, male, and wealthy – a member of an elite minority.
16. The average total cost of using a local dial-up Internet account for 20 hours a month and USD 60 a month in the US. The average African monthly salary is less than USD 60.
17. Before they can read, almost one in four children in nursery school are learning a skill that even some adults have yet to master: using the Internet, about 23per cent of children in nursery school – kids age 3,4, or 5 – have gone online.
18. At the end of the 20th century, 90 percent of data on Africa was stored in Europe and the United States.
19. Facebook now has 24 million users who spend an average of 14 minutes on the site every time they visit. This is up from 8 minutes last September, according to Hit wise, a traffic measuring service.
20. MySpace has 67 million numbers - nearly 3 times as many as Facebook! MySpace users spend an average of 30 minutes on the site each time they visit.
21. If you want to sell your book on amazon.com you can set the price, but then they will take a 55 percent cut and leave you with only 45 percent.
22. R Tomlinson was the first person on records to have sent an email. His email address was: tom-linson@bbn.tenexa . He had invented this software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. He is also credited with the use of the @ in email addresses.
23. Counting only domain name sites with content, Netcraft has tracked the growth of the internet since 1995 and says of the 100 million; around 48 million are active sites that are updated regularly. When it began observing sites through the domain name system in 1995, there were 18,000 websites in existence.
24. On the internet, a ’bastion host’ is the only host computer that a company allows to be addressed directly from the public network.
25. Around 1 percent of the world’s 650 million corporate e-mail accounts are plugged into hardware and software that forwards incoming messages to a mobile device. And about 3.65 million of them use a Blackberry.
26. Almost half of the people online have at least three e-mail accounts. In addition, the average consumer has maintained the same e-mail address for four to six years.
27. Spam accounts for over 60 percent of all emails, according to Message Labs. Google says at least one-third of all Gmail servers are filled with spam.
28. Yahoo started out as “Jerry and David’s guide to the world Wide Web”. Jerry Yang and David Filo were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford in 1994 when they started the site.
29. The first Web browser was already capable of downloading and displaying movies, sounds, and any file type supported by the operating system.
30. ’Carnivore’ is the Internet surveillance system developed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which developed it to monitor the electronic transmissions of criminal suspects.
31. Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spam (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21, 2005.
32. A NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the world’s first web server.
33. The first website was built at CERN. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research and is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
34. The World Wide Web is the most extensive implementation of hypertext but it is not the only one. A computer help file is actually a hypertext document.
35. The concept of style sheets was already in place when the first browser was released.
36. Worldwide Web was programmed with Objective C.
37. Hypertext is implemented on the web as links in the browser window. Links are references to text that the user wants to access. When a link is clicked the referenced text is displayed or brought into focus.
38. The address of the world’s first web server was  http://info.cern.ch/.  The URL of the first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Although this page is not hosted anymore at CERN, a later version of the page is posted at http://www.w3.org/History/199921103hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
39. In December 1991, the first institution in the US to adopt the web was the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). True to the Berners-Lee vision, it was used to display an online catalog of SLAC’s documents.
40. Marc Andreessen started Netscape and released Netscape Navigator in 1994. during the height of its popularity, Netscape Navigator accounted for almost 90 percent of all web users.
41. The first browser that made the web available to PC and Mac users was Mosaic. It was developed by National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) led by Marc Andreessen in February 1993. Mosaic was one of the first graphical web browsers and led to an explosion in web use.
42. April 30, 1993, is an important date for the Web because, on that day, CERN announced that anyone may use WWW technology freely.
43. Microsoft released Internet Explorer in 1995. This event initiated the browser wars. By bundling internet explorer with the Windows operating system, by 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share of over 95 percent.
44. It was in the Conference Dinner on May 26, 1994, where the first Best of WWW awards were given. It was by pure coincidence that the jazz band that played during the awards was called “Wolfgang and the Were Wolves”.
45. Only 4 percent of Arab women use the Internet. Moroccan women represent almost a third of that figure.
46. As of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer accounted for 67.68 percent of all browsers used Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 percent of all users.
47. The development of standards for the World Wide Web is managed by the W3C or the World Wide Web consortium. The W3C was founded in October 1994 and headed by Tim Berners-Lee.
48. The first White House website was launched during the Clinton-Gore administration on October 21, 1994. Coincidentally, the site www.whitehouse.com linked to a pornography website.
49. Open source technology dominates the web. The most common software used for web serving is called LAMP standing for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySql database, and PHP scripting language.
50. The “www” part of a website (www.google.com) is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard.
51. Despite IPv4’s 4.3 billion unique addresses, it is forecasted that by 2011, the address space will be consumed. A newer scheme called IPv6 is slowly replacing IPv4 in some countries. IPv6 has the capability to address 2128 computers. to give perspective to this very big number, the world’s population of 6.5 billion people as of 2006 can be given 295 unique addresses.
52. YouTube’s bandwidth requirements to upload and view all those videos cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and drawing. The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its upkeep.
53. The blue-colored links on a web page are just a browser default because way back in the days when monitors only had 16 colors, blue was the darkest color that did not affect text legibility.
54. All three-letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.
55. Around 75 percent of the music that is available for download has never been purchased and it is costing money just to be on the server.
56. One million domain names are registered every month.
57. According to AT&T vice president Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute. This was in April 2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube received 20 hours of video content per minute.
58. Of the 13 million music files available on the web, 52,000 tunes accounted for 80 percent of downloads.
59. By 2012 it has been said that there will be 17 billion devices connected to the internet. In most of Asia, mobile phones are leading the way to internet connectivity.
60. The term Deep Web is used to refer to a wealth of information that is at least 400 to 550 times larger than the searchable Internet. This content consisting of most of the information on today’s active websites is stored in databases that are invisible to search engines. this information contains data such as prices of items, airfares, and other stuff that will never surface unless somebody queries for that information. The Deep Web and all that hidden information are what prevent search engines from giving us a definitive answer to simple questions like "How much is the cheapest airfare from New York to London next Thursday?"
61. In a recent survey conducted by security specialist Symantec of the 100 most unsafe and malware-infested websites, 48 percent of them feature adult content.
62. Naked women make up 80 percent of all the pictures on the internet.
63. The online population of Facebook, 250 million users worldwide, and MySpace, which had 100 million accounts by 2007, are bigger than the populations of many nations worldwide. In April 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of monthly visits.
64. It took the web only 4 years to reach 50 million users. Radio took 38 years while TV made it in 13 years.
65. Amazon.com was formerly known as Cadabra.com
66. A blogger Kyle MacDonald, made history in 2006 by trading his way to glory. Starting out with a paper clip, he traded his way to increasingly costlier items and of value including a year’s rent and an afternoon with the Alice Cooper. He eventually traded a film role for a two-story farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan.
67. Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to consume 27 to 55 percent of all internet bandwidth as of February 2009.
68. Domain registration was free until the National Science Foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995.
69. It is estimated that one of every eight married couples started by meeting online.
70. Lee Stein invented the first online electronic bank in 1994 entitled, "First Virtual Holdings".
71. The Internet is roughly 35% English with the Chinese at 14%. Yet only 13% of the world’s population i.e. 812 million are Internet users as of December 2004. North America has the highest continental concentration with 70 percent of the populace using the Internet.
72. Official statistics in the UK say that 29 percent of women have never used the internet, but only 20 percent of men.
73. In 1995, Bob Metcalfe coined the phrase ’The Web might be better than sex’.
74. Iceland has the highest percentage of Internet users at 68 percent. The United States stands at 56%. 34% of all Malaysians use the Internet while only eight percent of Jordanians are connected, 4% of Palestinians; 0.6% of Nigerians, and 0.1% of Tajikistan.
75. Employees at Google are encouraged to use 20 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
76. Afghanistan has a combined telephone penetration of 3.4 percent.
77. Someone is a victim of a cybercrime every 10 seconds and it is on the rise.
78. The first search engine for Gopher files was called Veronica, created by the University of Nevada System Computing Services group.
79. The Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies) is an international group of internet activists based in Oxfordshire, England, whose purpose is to express disapproval of governmental policies of mass media censorship and control of the Internet "in order to provide a ’safe environment’ for corporations to do their deals."
80. Luking is to read through mailing lists or newsgroups and get a feel of the topic before posting one’s own message.
81. The Internet was called the ’Galactic Network’ in memos written by MIT’s JCR Licklider in 1962.
82. The first internet worm was created by Robert Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6,000 Internet hosts.
83. SRS stands for Shared Registry Server which is the central system for all accredited registrars to access, register, and control domain names.
84. The search engine Lycos is named after Lycosidae which is a Latin name for the wolf spider family.
85. It is believed that Subhash Ghai’s film Taal was the first Bollywood movie to be widely promoted on the internet.
86. Rob Glasser’s company Progressive Networks launched the RealAudio system on April 10, 1995.
87. Butter Jeeves of the internet site AskJeeves.com made its debut as a large helium balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in 2000.
88. In Beijing, the internet community has coined the word ’Chortal’ as a shortened version of the Chinese Portal.
89. Satyam Online became the first private ISP in December 1998 to offer internet connection in India.
90. In 1946, Merriam Webster defined a computer as a person who tabulates numbers, accountant, actuary, bookkeeper.
91. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) went online connecting four major US universities. The idea was to have a backup in case a military attack destroyed the conventional communication system.
92. The first-ever ISP was CompuServe which still exists under AOL, Timer Warner.
93. Jeff Bezos while starting his business could not name his website Cadabra due to copyright issues. He later named it amazon.com.
94. The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls at a time.
95. The first coin-operated machine ever designed was a holy-water dispenser that required a five-drachma piece to operate. It was the brainchild of the Greek scientist Hero in the first century A.D.