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FOR PEOPLE OF a certain age, it can seem like the the internet always existed.
For those of us who are a little more, how shall we put this, mature, we remember life before the World Wide Web.
But how many remember all the firsts that came with it? Here’s some of the more interesting ones…
The first… picture uploaded to the internet
Was… an image of a comedy band called Les Horrible Cernettes. And the person who uploaded it? None other than the man who invented the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
The first… email sent
Was… sent by Ray Tomlinson – to himself – in 1971. “The test messages were entirely forgettable… Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar,” he said.
The first… spam email
We can blame the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) – the first network to implement TCP/IP – for the first spam email, that was sent to 393 people on 3 May, 1978.
(Monitor screen showing email spam mailbox – Shutterstock)
The first… domain name ever registered
Was… symbolics.com. The date? March 15, 1985.
The first… online banner ad
Was… created by Joe McCambley. It went live in October 1994 on hotwired.com, and it promoted seven art museums.
The first… item sold on eBay (then called AuctionWeb)
Was… a broken laser pointer for $14.83 in 1995. The man who bought it told founder Pierre Omidyar he collected broken laser pointers.
The first… book bought on Amazon
Was… Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought in 1995.
Try saying that five times fast.
The first… sentence uttered on Skype
Was… in Estonian in April 2003 by a member of the development team. It was “Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?” or “Hello, can you hear me?” in English.
The first… person of Facebook
Was… Mark Zuckerberg, who was given ID number four. The first three Facebook accounts were test accounts.
The first… YouTube video
Was… posted by co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. It was uploaded on April 23, 2005 and has been watched over 10 million times.
(jawed/YouTube)
The first… tweet
Was… written by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.
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“I’m fairly sure that if they removed all the porn from the Internet there’d only be one website left, and that website would be called ‘Bring Back The Porn’”
(Dr. Cox, Scrubs).
Heh heh heh
Symbolics…
Even now,
guess I’m still a kid !
I’m surprised that the co founder of Twitter, doesn’t know how to spell Twitter.
It was called twttr in the very early days.
Your Ma was called twttr in the early days!
Hmm I read this exact article 2 days ago on yahoo..
Did you leave the same comment?
Ah the good old days of eBay. I joined on 1996 when there was still only eBay.com and you didnt even need a credit card to verify your account. The days of paypal was long in the future so a card was useful to pay for things but more often you were reduced to international bank drafts. I still have boxes of stuff I bought on there around that time. Anyone remember yahoo auctions? Of course, if you wanted to view a picture of what you were bidding on you had to watch it download line by line, pixel by pixel. Thats what a top of the range 8mb of ram and a 14.4kbps dial up connection got you!
I remember buying stuff on ebay with bank drafts alright, I never got ripped off either :-)
Wonder when they added the u to the keyboard.. Or was it the first ever typo…
The same day the added every other letter of the alphabet.
The Internet was invented in/at CERN (the large circular particle accelerator under the Swiss-French border). I guess you could consider it an Internet first?
Oh no it wasn’t!
Btw, cern were floundering untill Steve Jobs built them a supercomputer.
Yes, yes.
Sent from an android.
Mr Jobs was more than just apple!
No, the Internet was invented in America by ARPA. You are confusing it with the World Wide Web which was created by Tim Berners Lee at CERN.
The original internet was a US military application.
The web was a scholarly application.
Bringing the two together was inspired but lucky. Just like most big things in human history.
That’s an extremely simple explanation of some inspired work by complex individuals working in tandem to create a communication system that crossed all barriers.
To the man who saw it all, sir Tim, I salute you.
I think you will find that it was Dr John Terry who invented the Internet – I can see him in the background of that iconic photo.
You’re all wrong. It was Al Gore.
They have the Internet on computers now?
downloading linux onto 35 3½ floppies via ftp when it happened in 95.
To vint cerf(creator of tcp/ip protocol), tim berners lee (creator of html), linus torvalds (creator of linux), above all, dennis ritchie (dmr rip) the creator of C programming language in which the computing landscape would never happened without you. :)
Linux was a rewrite of the existing 70s Unix kernel….
There was an article on mosaic floating around the web recently, it was the forerunner to Netscape I used both, I remember buying the office it’s first modem a 2500 baud rate, for those of you with your 50mb UPC I had 1,250kbits per sec so 40,000 times slower it really is amazing how much tech and communications have progressed in the 22 years since
I remember mosaic well. To be honest we are still using the essence of it as the guts of it still make the framework of IE.
Anyway I can go one further.
I remember using the Internet prior to the WWW. When we used handset duplex modems connected directly with BBS’s. Email was there in its rudimentary form but everything else was more like peer to peer file sharing. And as I was a teenager at the time I can state that there was porn even then. Although there was no thumbs, just a file name so you didn’t really know what you were getting until a pic downloaded (up to 1/2 hour each to my recollection).
Lol Ads, I’ve seen those modems and I remember dialling in to the BBSs and Porn was definitely a major player we’d run from one end of the room to the other shrieking and showing the bosses the pictures longggggg before I had to draft Internet/email usage policies for colleagues.
Symbolics.com Fnar!
When I used to be a child prodigy I invited things
The Internet was not Initiated by the first person to connect, but by the second!
What was the first person connecting to then ?
Apparently UCC’s domain ucc.ie was the eighth to be registered
Anti-government right wing Americans are usually surprised when they find out that the Internet and the WWW were created by governments.
Some are surprised that the Hubble Space Telescope is a spy satellite looking upwards rather than down into the Kremlin.
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