In 1998, David Bowie released an Internet provider called BowieNet. Subscribers were offered exclusive content and a BowieNet email. It was shut down in 2006.
100 Mind-Blowing Internet Facts
As of May 2015, 2.3 Million Americans still subscribed to AOL Dial-Up Internet.
There are computers designed for Amish people, with selling points like “No Internet, no video, no music.”
There are almost 5 billion Internet users in the world.
The inventor of the Internet regrets the URL setup. Tim Berners-Lee, who created the main software of the World Wide Web, admitted he regrets one thing: Adding “//” after “https:” in a web address. It was standard for programming but didn’t serve any real purpose, and when looking back in 2009, he said leaving it out would have saved time and space. We guess we can forgive him.
For every non-porn webpage, there are five porn pages. Whether that’s part of the fun facts is up to you or not, but 30% of all data transferred across the Internet is porn.
Russell Horning is famous on the Internet as the Backpack Kid. Russel was born and raised in Georgia. He gained popularity after Rihanna gave him a shoutout on Instagram in 2016. He is also known for creating the floss dance.
Baby rabbits are not called kittens. Baby bunnies are called kits, which isn’t short for kittens as the Internet has led many to believe. Mother rabbits can have up to 10-12 kits per litter.
When giraffes fight, they neck it out. Giraffes are a funny-looking bunch. When a viral video broke out of two giraffes fighting, the Internet found it hard to take them seriously. However, neck fights are the natural aggressive behaviour of giraffes. Usually, they get into these fights when competing for a mate.
Every second, over 2 million e-mails are sent. For each second on the Internet, 9.4 websites are created, 3,000,000 Google searches are done, and 672 people search for porn.
The man who invented pop-up advertisements deeply regrets it and says he’s very sorry. In 1997 Ethan Zuckerman wrote the code for the first pop-up and added it to a website. This, he believes, was the Internet’s equivalent of the original sin. While he understands that many websites and services on the Internet wouldn’t function without getting funding from advertisements, he believes that it’s high time to find an alternative that doesn’t involve an invasion of our privacy.
Nintendo used to have a hotline you could call if you were stuck in one of their games. Back in the days before the Internet, video games were much more challenging, and finding the right way to beat them sometimes seemed impossible. Nintendo was well aware of this, and in the US, at least provided a service called the “Powerline,” which struggling gamers could call for tips and tricks.
A chimpanzee was once ranked as the 22nd most successful money manager in the US. In 2009 Raven the chimpanzee was listed in the Guinness World Records book as the most successful chimpanzee on Wall Street. Raven chose her stocks by throwing darts at a board with 133 different Internet companies listed on it and achieved a 233% gain in 1999. She was so good that she performed better than 6,000 professional Wall Street brokers!
The Internet has its very own patron saint. St. Isidore of Seville may not seem at first to be the best patron saint of the Internet, considering he lived back in the 7th Century. While he certainly lived well before the Internet was invented, he shared many values with it. He tried to record all the knowledge he could get his hands on during his life, which isn’t that far from what the Internet is – a great big collection of knowledge!
The email came before the Internet.
The Internet was invented in a beer garden.
Japan has the fastest Internet speed of 319 terabits per second. This Internet speed is speedy enough to download approximately 80,000 movies per second. The engineers used fibre-optic cables to make this world-breaking record possible.
As of 2022, there are 5.1 billion Internet users, and 4.5 billion of them access it on their mobile phones.
There are 3.8 billion Internet users every day.
Approximately 8 billion gadgets connect to the Internet every day.
The desktop Internet usage is falling while the mobile Internet is rising.
The invention of the Internet is credited to computer scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn.
Internet privacy is becoming a big issue. Therefore, some choose to stay away from heavy social media.
“Non-human” intervention creates around 50% of Internet traffic.
Hacking programs, spammers and malicious phishing take 30% of the Internet traffic.
This is the first website ever. In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and published the first website ever which can be found here. Tim worked for CERN at the time. He hosted the first website on his NeXT Computer to allow scientists and universities to share information with ease. This archaic website described the World Wide Web (W3) project itself and was the start of the Internet Era as we know it today.
Google’s Name Comes From A Spelling Error. Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998. 70% of search queries worldwide run through Google’s search engine. On occasion, people wonder where the name Google comes from, and its origin story comes from a spelling error. A “googol”, in mathematics, is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Page originally wanted to call the search engine googol. By the time the company was formed, it switched its name to Google. Perhaps the name is easier to spell and looks more friendly on the screen. People perform billions of search queries each day through Google. It’s such a popular name that it became a verb years ago among users. Most people refer to running an Internet search as “Googling” something.
Which is the older email or www? Most people don’t realize email came long before the World Wide Web. Before the web came along, email worked much differently than today. Users needed to dial a rotary phone to connect to Micronet and access the email webpage. Academic researchers and government entities used email at the time. Consumer usage simply didn’t exist until the Internet came to fruition. Considering what email is today, its original form is archaic and almost confusing to see in action. For that reason, not a single person wants to return to the email systems of the past.
Google Was Put On Sale In 1999. In 1999, Yahoo and Excite held the top spots in search engine popularity. Larry Page pitched a sale of Google to Excite CEO George Bell. Page wanted $750,000 and 1% of Excite to let go of his fledgling search engine. At the time, Bell considered the offer competitive except for one detail: Page wanted Excite to ditch its search engine technology and adopt Google’s system. Bell declined the offer and threw himself into Internet lore. In 2021, most people don’t know the name Excite, but everyone knows and uses Google. The company is now worth over 300 billion dollars.
Record Number of Websites Currently in Operation. Statistics continue to be gathered by resources like Statista.com who have been monitoring the phenomenon of new websites since 1991 when Yahoo led the way for the establishment of Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. According to historians, the first website, launched on August 6, 1991, didn’t dominate the Internet for long. There were 3,000 websites operated by businesses and individuals by 1994, reflecting extraordinary growth by any measure. The fact that there are now 1.88 billion websites in existence says plenty about how crowded cyberspace is becoming.
Domain name registration used to be free. Way back when people didn’t realize how huge the Internet would be, registering a domain name was free until 1995. When a fee was introduced, it was high! Prices were typically $100 for two years of registration.
There are Amish computers. There are computers specially designed without Internet, video, or music capabilities, just for the Amish. The features include word processing, drawing, accounting, spreadsheets, and more – but not much more.
The first online gaming was before the year 2000. Sega Dreamcast was the first 128-bit console to hit the market. Released in 1999, it was the first console that allowed real-time online play. Unfortunately, it was a little too early for its time, as back then, most Internet connections were not reliable enough.
People are still using dial-up. As of 2017, 2.1 million people still use AOL’s dial-up service. Mainly, these customers live in rural America, where it can be expensive and unreliable to get high-speed Internet. Meanwhile, dial-up is only $20 per month.
NASA’s Internet speed is 91 GB per second. The average household Internet speeds are roughly 25 MB per second, which is usually fast enough to watch Netflix with no buffer time. And let’s face the fact; if there’s any tech company that would make good use of their Internet speeds, it’s NASA.
The first webpage is still running. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee was working on developing the World Wide Web. There are no graphics and no background, just plain text and links on how to use the Internet!
There’s a term for old people who use the Internet. Seniors who are over 50 and use the Internet regularly are rare these days. So rare there’s a term for it – Silver Surfers.
Until 2010, carrier pigeons were faster than the Internet. When comparing upload speeds, a test was done to fly a carrier pigeon with a USB stick 50 miles to an Internet provider while racing against an Internet upload. The pigeon made it in just over an hour, while the upload took over two hours.
The first photo ever uploaded to the Internet was of a comedy band. A four-piece all-female parody pop group lays claim to being in the first photo to ever be uploaded to the Internet. The group, called “Les Horribles Cernettes,” were colleagues with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He asked them for some scanned photos of their band so he could publish them online, and history was made!
Most Internet traffic isn’t from real humans. About 51% of Internet traffic is non-human. Over 30% is from hacking programs, spammers, and phishing. Be careful with your computer security!
There are more than 5.1 billion active users on the Internet, with Asia comprising more than 50% of total Internet traffic.
4.28 billion users access the web via mobile Internet.
More than 90% of Americans have Internet access, with 77% reporting broadband access at home.
IoT Analytics projects that 2023 will see a growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices of 18% to 14.4 billion, and by 2025 this could increase to 27 billion connected IoT devices.
About 3.9 Billion Internet Users have Experienced a Malware Attack. This massive number shows how much malware is a deadly threat to Internet users. Interestingly, users can get these malware files by tapping on a malicious link, downloading a file, or opening a malware-infected file.
Over 970 Million Pieces of Malware are Distributed Across the Internet. The growth of malware seems to have no end, as over 970 million copies of malware are circulating the Internet. Every year, malware keeps increasing by nearly 100 million.
Approximately 33 Million Businesses in the United States Used Paid Versions of Antivirus Software in 2023. Approximately 33 million businesses use premium antivirus software to improve Internet security, password management, and secure browsing. The report from 2022 shows that 25 million businesses use premium antivirus software today.
The majority of websites that you visit on the Internet run on Linux-based servers.
The Dutch police’s Internet Research and Investigation Network has been using Linux since as early as 2003.
If we search for the Internet in Ubuntu, then it will display all the available Internet browsers.
An average of around 24,000 malicious mobile apps are blocked daily on the Internet. (Tech Jury)
Nearly half (47.4 per cent) of all Internet traffic came from bots in 2022, which is a 5.1% increase over 2021 (Imperva)
In the past 5 years, there have been over 2.2 million complaints about Internet crime to the FBI (FBI IC3): According to the Internet Crime Complaints Centre – or IC3, the number of complaints issued to the centre has increased significantly in the last five years. Around 2.2 million complaints were recorded in 2020. The FBI notes this is a significant increase since the beginning of 2016. What’s more, the cost of cyber-attacks is higher too. In 2016, complaints of hacking and cybercrime accounted for around $1.5 billion in losses. In 2020, the complaints accounted for around $4.2 billion.
Edward Snowden Leaks: In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified information about NSA surveillance programs, including PRISM and metadata collection, which revealed extensive data collection from U.S. Internet service providers and cellular phone calls.
PRISM Program: The PRISM program collected information from U.S. Internet service providers, targeting non-Americans but also collecting data from Americans with whom those individuals had communicated.
Only 8% of the world’s currency is in cash: The vast majority of the world’s currency exists in electronic form. Economists estimate that coins and banknotes make up just 8% of the world’s currency. The rest sits on a computer hard drive in electric bank accounts all over the world. Because of the worldwide acceptance of the Internet and online payments, people are making and spending money without actually touching it.
There are over one billion users on YouTube, which is nearly one-third of everyone on the Internet.
For paid users, it is possible to access the Internet through ChatGPT using the Bing selector, something that isn’t possible with GPT-3.5.
There exist many other alternatives and competitors for ChatGPT both paid and free. One of them is HIX, an all-in-one AI writing suite.; YouChat, an AI chatbot within the You search engine; Claude 2, an AI tool that can access Internet links and provide insight, and more. Perplexity.ai is a popular ChatGPT tool used for research.
Only one of the top 10 Internet companies in 2022 is from Europe – and that’s Booking.com. Still, this is better than the previous years when none of the top 10 came from this continent. The 10 biggest are (in order of size): Amazon, Alphabet Inc., Meta (formerly Facebook), Tencent Holdings, Alibaba, Netflix, Salesforce.com, JD.com, Booking.com, and Baidu.