The International Internet Day is observed on October 29 every year to mark the anniversary of the first Internet connection and the first electronically sent message in 1969. That’s right, whether you believe it or not, today the Internet turns 45!
Can you imagine your life without social media? Or without looking up everything in Google? Today we communicate, learn new things, and shop on the web and businesses, stock markets and even national economies depend on it. The internet has been in our everyday lives for about 20-25 years, but it’s actually a bit older. On October 29, we celebrate the so-called “birth of Internet”, a momentous occasion that forever changed the world. The very first electronic message said “LO” and was sent between two computers on October 29, 1969, exactly 45 years ago.
The story about the creation of the Internet may sound a little weird, especially for the younger generation born when it was already widely available. In the late 1960s, the U.S. government approved of an experiment, which included a network of four large computers located at Stanford, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The network between them was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). On October 29, student programmer at the University of California LA Charley Kline transmitted a message over the network to programmer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute. Kline tried to type the word “LOGIN”, but unfortunately he managed to enter only “LO” before the system crashed. And this is how the Internet was born.
And to celebrate Internet’s 45th birthday, let’s see 8 facts you probably don’t know.
1. The first ever spam message was sent to 600 recipients back in 1978 for DEC System 2020.
2. Most of the Internet traffic isn’t generated by humans – it is generated by bots (Google, malware, etc.).
3. More than 30,000 websites are being hacked every day.
4. The first ever YouTube video “Me and the zoo” was uploaded on April 23, 2005 by one of the founders Jawed Karim and can still be viewed on the website.
5. Experts have estimated that 80% of all images on the Internet are of naked women.
6. Since its launch, Google has created more than 2,000 regional and international Doodles.
7. As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people have used the Internet.
8. As of 2013, 39% of the global population is regular Internet users.
