Home Today Is The First-Ever Webcam Was Not For Chatting. It Was To Monitor A...

The First-Ever Webcam Was Not For Chatting. It Was To Monitor A Coffee Maker At Cambridge

There is no denying the importance of the World Wide Web. In fact, most people rely on the World Wide Web in order to find out information and carry out tasks online every day. It is integral to a lot of jobs as well. Therefore, it is only right that we have a day to honor the World Wide Web, and that is what World Wide Web Day is all about.

  • The first-ever image that was posted on the World Wide Web. This was uploaded in 1992 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, which is a parody pop band that was founded by employees at CERN.
  • You have also probably used the term “surfing the net” a lot. It was created by  librarian Jean Armour Polly. She is credited with coining the term. This was as a consequence of an article she published called “Surfing the Internet” in March of 1992. This article was published in the Wilson Library Bulletin at the University of Minnesota.
  • The first computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a web server was a NeXT computer.  This computer was also used to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb.
  • It was announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone in 1993.
  • The launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993 was a major turning point for the World Wide Web. It is credited with popularizing the World Wide Web.
  • While the first popular search engine is known as Yahoo! Search, it is believed that Archie was the first of its kind. This was the first tool for FTP archive indexing, enabling people to locate specific files.
  • There was significant growth in 1993. At the start of the year, there were only 50 servers around the world. However, this number had grown to more than 500 servers being online by October of the same year. Two of the earliest webcomics also started during this period as well: NetBoy and Doctor Fun.
  • Yahoo! Directory was launched in January of 1994, and this was then followed by the search engine – Yahoo! Search – in 1995. It was, therefore, the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. We also saw the start of web commerce in 1995, as Amazon and eBay were both founded.
  • In 1980, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had invented his own personal web of data called Enquire, which linked all of the pages and information within it. This was arguably a little like his first attempt at what would become the web nine years later.
  • The internet and the web, are not the same. The internet is a huge network of computers all over the world, which are connected together.  The world wide web – or web – is a collection of web pages found on this network of computers.
  • Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. While some call him “Sir Tim”, he most often goes by “timbl”.
  • Today it is estimated that just under 40% of the world’s population has Internet access. On average, a fixed broadband connection costs over a third of income in the developing world.
  • The languages most used in online communications are, in order: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese.
  • The first-ever website to go online is still online. On August 6, 1991, the first website http://info.cern.ch went online.
  •  Can you guess the number of websites online today? Well, we are a tad below the 2 Billion mark. As of now, there are over 1.8 billion websites online (excluding the number of inactive websites). You can find the live figure here.
  • There are more devices in this world that are connected to the Internet than there are the number of human beings living on Earth.
  • US programmer Ray Tomlinson was the first person to invent the email system. He sent the first-ever email in 1971. However, Indian-born scientist Shiva Ayyadurai (a bio-scientist based in the United States) who claims that Tomlinson only invented a primitive form of text messaging and that the actual email was invented by Ayyadurai himself in 1978 when he was 14 years old.
  • Google didn’t really come up with Gmail. Gmail.com was in fact a free email service offered by Garfield (the famous cartoon cat character). Google simply acquired Gmail.
  • The first-ever webcam that was used was not for chatting. It was meant for monitoring a coffee maker to ensure that people would not walk down to the coffee maker only to find that the pot was empty. The webcam was deployed at the computer lab of Cambridge University.
  • An engineer named Steve Wilke was the person who invented the GIF image format in 1987
  • Approximately 250 billion emails are sent every day. Interestingly 81% of these emails are spam.
  • 80% of all images found on the Internet are of naked women.
  • One-third of all Internet searches every day are about porn.
  • The top five popular websites in the world are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu and Wikipedia, as per Alexa Internet research

Sources:

Days of the Year

CBBC Newsround

W3

Facts Legend