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The World Wide Web Turns 25: We’ve Got 25 Fast Facts You Need to Know

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On March 12, 2014, the World Wide Web will turn 25 years old. It’s hard for many people to imagine life before the Internet, an invention that has revolutionized nearly every other industry on the planet. In honor of 25 years of websites, chat rooms, and memes, here are some of our favorite facts about the World Wide Web.

1. The Web Has 2 Birthdays

Most people mark the “birth” of the Internet on March 12, 1989. This is the date when Sir Tim Berners-Lee published a paper about “information management,” and it was this paper that outlined what would become the Internet we know and love today.

However, you could make the argument that the Web’s birthday should actually be Christmas Day, 1990. On that day, Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web code for free to the public.

2. The World Wide Web and the Internet Are Not the Same Thing

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The Pew Research report “The Web at 25 in the U.S.” clarifies a common misconception. The net and the web aren’t actually interchangeable terms, even though many people still use them that way. Pew explains:

“The internet is rules (protocols) that enable computer networks to communicate with each other. The Web is a service that uses the network to allow computers access files and pages that are hosted on other computers.

Other applications that are different from the Web also exploit the internet’s architecture to facilitate such things as email, some kinds of instant messaging, and peer-to-peer activities like internet phone calling through services like Skype or file sharing through torrent services.”

3. Most People Use It, Most People Can’t Give It Up

As this article on Mashable notes, most Americans would give up their TV before they’d give up the Internet!

Pew Research adds that 87% of American adults use the Internet. That number is close to 99% in households earning over $75,000.

4. Most People Believe the Web Improved Their Lives

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One last fact from that fascinating Pew survey. According to Pew, an overwhelming number of Americans believe that the Internet has been a positive influence in their lives. Yes, despite their constant griping about Facebook invites and email spam, the average American really loves the web.

Pew’s researchers write:

“…we asked about the users themselves: ‘Overall, when you add up all the advantages and disadvantages of the internet, would you say the internet has mostly been a good thing or a bad thing for you?’…

90% of internet users say that overall the internet had been a good thing for them and 6% said it was a bad thing. Another 3% volunteered the answer that it had been both good and bad for them.”

5. The Web Is About to Get a Lot Bigger

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It’s no secret that one of the biggest sites on the web is Facebook. In our article about Facebook’s 10th anniversary, we discussed Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for making the Internet more accessible to people in the developing world.

Zuckerberg is part of Internet.org, a technology consortium that aims to bring technology into poorer countries, thereby boosting their economies. Tech companies such as Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung are also part of the consortium. In the coming years, Zuckerberg’s initiative is going to bring even more users online, growing the web into a truly global place.

On the next page, learn what sites are most popular, and how the web changed the English language…

6. Google Was the Most-Visited Site in 2013

Marketingland reports that Google was the most-visited site on the web in 2013. However, it took a long time for Google to become top dog in the search engine world.

A look back at Top 10 lists of most-visted sites from 2003 and 2006 shows sites like Myspace and AOL ahead of Google. Sites like Go, Pogo, and Netscape all appeared on those lists, despite not being very popular today.

7. The Web Is Still Mainly in English

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According to recent figures on W3Techs, about 55.5% of all webpages are written in English. This is down from 56.4% in 2002.

This might change in the coming years, however. SEO expert Alexandru Rotaru notes that other languages are growing more popular online.

He writes:

“…the growth in English usage online stands at just over 281% over the past decade – far less than Spanish (743%), Chinese (1,277%), Russian (1,826%) or Arabic (showing a massive growth of 2,501% over the same period).

There are many social, economic and technological factors that may affect the incidence of internet usage within certain territories but, should these trends continue, the proportion of English speaking internet users will naturally fall further. With internet penetration standing at 33% in Chinese and 37% in Spanish speaking markets (as opposed to 42% in English) there is also still a lot of scope for this potential growth in foreign language markets to continue.”

8. The Web Changed the Way English Is Spoken

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Between new tech companies, funny memes, and an increased focus on online activity, the English language has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. The web introduced millions of English speakers to words like email, phishing, noob, griefer, blog, cyberbully, and “unfriend.”

But it’s not just the addition of hundreds of new Internet-related words that have changed how English is spoken. The very culture of the web, with all it’s awkwardly phrased memes and grammatically incorrect phrasing, has actually affected the grammar people use when speaking aloud, as well as when they write.

The Atlantic ran an interesting article last year that argued the Internet was to blame for the word “because” transitioning from a conjunction to a preposition.

9. The Internet Changed Our Brains…But Not For the Better

The Bloomberg video above discusses how the FCC is pushing high-speed Internet speeds to students, along with some other top headlines.

A Columbia University researcher has discovered that living in “The Age of Google” is actually changing the way our brains work…and not necessarily for the better.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” says researcher Betsy Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

In other words, we no longer need to remember the state capital of Arkansas, because our brains know we can look that information up at any time from our computers or smartphones.

10. The Web Changed the Path to Superstardom

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CNN argues that the web changed how ordinary people could become famous. CNN argues that today’s mega-stars like Kate Upton and Justin Beiber owe their fame to their web presence.

The web also created a new kind of celeb, the “Internet-famous.” This class of person isn’t famous in a mainstream way, but is beloved by a group of fervent online fans. Examples of “Internet-famous” people might include Tron Guy or Chocolate Rain.

On the next page, learn about online shopping and the very first web browser…

11. The Web Makes Us More Susceptible to Privacy Violations

All this access to information and entertainment has come at a price. Between fears of NSA snooping and the news that Yahoo! users had their webcam footage spied upon, the web has left many average people surprisingly vulnerable to privacy violations.

12. Online Shopping Has Never Been Bigger

While it’s not as old as the Internet itself, Amazon.com is coming up on a milestone of its own. Amazon will turn 20 next year, and it could be argued that Amazon’s success set the stage for the broad range of web commerce sites out there today.

The Wall Street Journal writes that while online retail figures are very high, they still seem tiny when compared to brick and mortar stores.

“Even on the friendliest turf for online shopping — computers and electronics — Internet stores are claiming just 25% of the market,” the Journal notes.

13. The First Popular Web Browser Is No More

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NBC notes that the first popular web browser came out in 1993. It was called Mosaic, and you can see it above. Wikipedia notes that the browser’s heyday came to an end around 1998, when other browsers became more popular.

In case you were wondering what the most popular browsers are today, ZDNet published an article last year than can shed some light on the subject. On tablets, Safari leads by “a wide margin.” On computers, however, Internet Explorer takes over 50% of users, with Firefox taking about 20% and Chrome taking about 17%. Safari, by contrast, gets just over 5%.

14. People Make Snap Judgements Based on Websites

According to report from Latitude, 61% of people admit that they have a better opinion of a brand when that brand offers a good mobile experience. In other words, if you have a bad mobile version of your website, consumers are unlikely have to have a favorable opinion of your entire brand.

These kinds of snap judgements aren’t limited to company websites. The same phenomenon can also be experienced on dating websites, or on apps like Tinder.

15. This Is the First Image Ever Uploaded to the Web

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The image above is the very first image ever uploaded on the web. Les Horribles Cernettes was a doo-wop girl group. The group performed at the CERN Hardronic Festival in 1992, after which this image was posted on the web by Tim Berners-Lee.

On the next page, learn about AOL’s crazy CD scheme…

16. Those ‘Free’ AOL Discs Weren’t Exactly Free

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People of a certain age remember when AOL would send their start-up discs out in the mail, seemingly every month. But while those discs might have been free to consumers, they cost the company a pretty penny. According to TechCrunch, AOL “probably spent about $35 per user on things such as these discs,” or about $300 million in total.

TechCrunch adds, “The subscriber growth helped grow AOL from a market cap of $70 million at the time of their IPO to $150 billion when the merger with Time Warner occurred.”

At one point, over 50% of all CD’s being produced on the planet were AOL startup CDs.

17. The Entire Internet Used to Fit on 1 Computer

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See that busted old NeXTCube up there? Believe it or not, that was the computer that housed the whole Internet. That was the first web server, owned by Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN.

According to The Next Web, the first website went online in August of 1991.

18. Congress Should Be Thanked For Opening Up Internet Commerce

Business Insider notes that Congress actually played a key role in the growth of the web. In 1992, Congress passed the Scientific Advanced Technology Act. This act allowed people, for the first time, to explore commercial interests online. Without this bill passing, ISPs couldn’t charge for their services and sites like eBay would have been illegal.

19. Many Websites Almost Had Strange, Different Names

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Sites like Twitter, Amazon, and eBay are well-known parts of the Internet landscape. But these sites almost had different names. eBay was almost “echobay.com,” while Amazon was almost called “Cadabra,” until Jeff Bezos realized it sounded too much like “cadaver.” Twitter was almost called “Jitter” and Yelp was almost called “Yocal.”

On the next page, learn about the first items sold on eBay and Amazon…

20. The First Book Sold on Amazon Was Pretty Nerdy

According to Mashable, the very first book ever sold by Amazon was pretty highbrow. Sold in July of 1995, the book was “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.”

In case you were wondering, the first thing ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer. It was bought for $14.83.

21. The Amount of Time You Spend Online Might Surprise You

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According to a 2013 article on the Huffington Post, the average American spend about 4.5 hours watching TV, but over 5 hours online, either on the computer or on a mobile device.

A recent ComScore study finds that Canadians spend even more time online than Americans. Canadians spend 45 hours per month online, which is almost double the global average.

Wondering how your online time breaks down? Mashable reports that about 18% of your online time is spent on social media. The average Facebook user, for example, spends nearly 7 hours per month on the site. The average person watches 10 hours of Netflix per month.

22. The Internet Weighs as Much as a Strawberry, But It’s Still Huge

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According to an article on the Huffington Post, “Professor John Kubiatowicz, from the University of California, Berkeley, worked out that weight of all the electrons in motion that make up the internet at any one moment is equivalent to 50 grams. Or, the weight of a strawberry.”

The entire Internet’s worth of data is estimated to be somewhere around 1.2 Zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes). Writer Andy Greenhaw visualizes this amount of data by comparing it to “339 miles of fully-loaded iPads stacked to the sky.”

According to Focus Magazine, a lot of that data is housed by just a few companies. They write:

“Consider the sum total of data held by all the big online storage and service companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Estimates are that the big four store at least 1,200 petabytes between them. That is 1.2 million terabytes (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes). And that figure excludes other big providers like Dropbox, Barracuda and SugarSync, to say nothing of massive servers in industry and academia.”

23. The Internet Is a Big Part of the Economy

The Bloomberg video above addresses the question, “What is life like with Google’s super-fast Internet?”

Some of the world’s biggest tech companies pull down some surprising sales figures. According to Business Insider, Amazon’s annual revenue is larger than half of the GDPs in the world.

Moreover, Google’s ad revenues alone are larger than that of the entire publishing industry in the United States. Another fun fact: Kickstarter has raised more money for art-related businesses in the United States than the National Endowment for the Arts.

24. The Internet of Things Is Big Business

The Internet of Things is poised to do big business in the coming years. ZDNet reports that, by 2020, the Internet of Things will be a $8.9 trillion industry. By that date, 212 billion devices with an internet connection will be in service.

25. The Future of the Web Is Pretty Cool

FutureTimeline.net, a website that collects predictions about technology in the future, has some intriguing thoughts about the role of the web in the coming decades. By the 2030s, the site predicts, we will be in the midst of “Web 4.0” – the next generation of the Internet.

The site writes:

“Semantic analysing programs, having evolved into stronger AI, now perform a huge range of automated tasks for business, government and consumers…

In addition, practically every physical document in existence has now been digitally encoded, backed up and archived online. This includes full copies of all books, journals, manuscripts and other literature ever published – forming a complete repository of human knowledge going back thousands of years. These documents can be retrieved and analysed using real-time speech commands, translated from any of the world’s 6,000 languages and accessed via 3D holographic imaging.”

FutureTimeline also predicts that terabit Internet connections will be widespread and fairly commonplace.

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Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! The greatest invention of the 20th Century will turn 25 on March 12, 2014.