Useless Internet Facts That Everyone Should Know

Rather than asking something like internet safety questions, the real fun begins when you ask internet trivia questions. The internet has been around for a long time, and there are now several generations who have never known a world without the internet. As such, some great content and myths and legends have come about relating to the internet.

Some make sense and answer your basic internet questions, some answer those internet safety questions, but the most fascinating are timeline-of-the-internet related questions. For those who got into the internet later in its development, or who were born with an ethernet umbilical, internet questions and answers about how things happened are the most enlightening and interesting.

So forget the fact that it is not made of tubes, forget the internet safety questions about the government spying on you, and forget that Al Gore did not, in fact, create it. Read on to learn the true timeline about that ubiquitous presence known as the internet.

It all began in 1969, the year the of the first moon landing, it was dubbed the Arpanet, and connected four computers in a university. In 1971 the very first email was sent, the contents of which cannot be remembered, but the sender believes it to have been just a button mash of letters, simply as a test. And then the first spam email was sent in 1978 to 393 recipients, advertising a new model of computers.

1982 saw the name change from Arpanet, to Internet, when it linked over 1,000 hosts at university and corporate labs. The very first domain name was registered in 1985, symbolics.com, and is still in existence today. It is older than I am!

Believe it or not, the first web browser, Mosaic, was not released until 1993. Followed by the first banner ad in 1994, advertising art museums on hotwired.com. ’94 also saw the first item ever sold online, a Sting cd, and the first ever search engine, known as WebCrawler.

The year 1995 brought with it the first ebay sale, a broken laser pointer, and the first book sold on the internet, aptly a book about computers. In 1996 the first internet enabled mobile phone came out, the Nokia 9000 communicator, launched in Finland. From there, things die down a little until the turn of the century. The first Wikipedia edit about some data concerning countries was done in 2001. Then in 2005 and 2006, the first YouTube video and first tweet were posted, respectively.

There you have it. Internet milestones perfect for any trivia night. Now you know your internet history and can impress all of your friends. And particularly if you have never known anything but the internet, it is important that you know where things started.