What are the origins of this fun-filled festive custom?
Long before the Internet was available for public use, it was a tool used by the United States' Department of Defense to pass along information between a certain selection of bases. The network was developed and used by the DoD's ARPA branch, or Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Before websites came around, W3 was just an ocean of files, and while revolutionary, still fairly difficult to navigate. Enter Archie (like archives), in 1990, and all that changed. Archie was the world's very first search engine, where users could enter keywords and search the Internet for the specific files and topics they were looking for.
It didn't take long until Tomlinson's discovery was put to less wholesome uses. Gary Thuerk, a man who came to be known as the "Father of Spam," sent out 400 emails to ARPANET users, trying to sell them new computers.
CERN itself is also responsible for uploading the first photograph on the Internet, in 1992. We once again look to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of W3, who uploaded a picture of a band made up of CERN employees known as Les Horribles Cernettes, a doo-wop girl group who sang love songs about computer chips and circuit boards.
Described by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) employee, as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents," the World Wide Web, or W3, connected the world in a brand new way in 1989. Its original purpose was to share scholarly information between laboratories and universities around the globe.
Before web browsers, you could search for images and you could search for documents, but the coding wasn't there to allow you to see images within documents, or any kind of multimedia. In January 1993, that all changed with the introduction of Mosaic, the self-proclaimed "first popular Internet browser." For the first time, people could create and view webpages embedded with text and image, set a homepage for your browser, and navigate through your browsing history.
Also in 1993, the first live-streamed webcam was put to use. The subject? A coffee pot in the Trojan computer science room at Cambridge University. More than two million people around the world logged on to check on the status of the coffee pot, obsessed with the sheer novelty of having a live update on something so far away.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, there was a student newspaper known as The Tech that made history when it began publishing online as well as in print. Soon after, major publications like The Wall Street Journal would follow, marking the beginning of the end of printed media.
About a year after W3 went online, CERN created the first website, simply titled "World Wide Web." To us, the page looks like nothing but a simple text document with a handful of hyperlinks, but it was a revolutionary addition to W3 at the time and helped users navigate and take full advantage of this new and exciting technology.
There were numerous search engines that popped up after Archie, but the first one to really revolutionize the search engine was Yahoo!, which started in a trailer as a project between two friends. Yahoo!, which was retroactively declared an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," was different from its predecessors in that it had a focus on entertainment and helped the commercial, lay users of the Internet find things more accessible than scholarly articles.
Today, advertisements and pop-up ads are the bane of our online existence, but it took a surprisingly long time for corporations to start taking advantage of all that empty web space. Cellular company AT&T was the first company to put up a banner ad on the Internet to entice customers to buy their products.
Today, Amazon is one of the largest and most pervasive companies in the entire world, owned by the on-again-off-again single richest person on earth, which makes it easy to forget that it started out as a modest online bookshop. The first purchase made on Amazon occurred on April 3rd, 1994, and the item was a copy of 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought,' by one Douglas R. Hofstadter.
MP3s, an improved and condensed version of MPEG audio files, took the Internet by storm in 1995. Indeed, the term is an acronym for MPEG audio Layer-3. Able to condense audio files down to a tenth of the size of MPEG files, MP3s made sharing music much easier, and music started flying around the Internet through underground pirate channels.
As of 2021, there were nearly 342 million distinct registered domain names on the Internet, but it all started with just one: symbolics.com. Symbolics was an American development company that hopped on the domain train before anybody else, even before the World Wide Web went online.
Today, much of the world relies on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services like Skype and WhatsApp to communicate. Skype long reigned king of the Internet phone services, but eight years before Skype was introduced, there was a simple service with an equally simple name: Internet Phone.
The Internet reached one of its largest and most influential milestones in 1998, with the advent of the Google search engine. Although Google is one of the biggest tech giants today, things could have gone a lot differently had Yahoo! not turned down an offer to buy out the young company for the measly price of US$1 million dollars.
While music was already being shared on the Internet underground since the advent of MP3s, it was made much easier and much more popular once Napster went online. Napster provided a single place on the Internet for everyone to share their music with everyone else, violently disrupting the music industry and leading to a major crackdown on filesharing.
It's glaringly obvious today what a massive impact Facebook has had and continues to have on the world, but in 2004 it was a simple, if not inherently toxic, social network to share and rank pictures of fellow college students. The first person to make an account, apart from Zuckerberg and co., was Arie Hasit, a friend of co-founder Chris Hughes.
It might come as a surprising reminder to some that phone apps long preceded smartphones. In fact, the first program to be considered an "app" was the beloved and classic game of Snake that could be played on the Nokia 6110 cell phone, which hit the shelves in 1997.
In 2005, YouTube changed the world of entertainment when it launched its site that allowed users to upload and view videos from around the world. The first video was posted by the site's founder, Jawed Karim, and consists of Karim standing in front of an elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, talking for 19 seconds about how cool their long trunks are.
Computer games were nothing new by the time the Internet burst onto the scene, but a multiplayer online game called 'Neverwinter Nights' took the world by storm. It established staples of the RPG (role-playing game) genre that are still popular today, such as player versus player combat and collaborative in-game communities called guilds.
In 2006, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet, the first of billions that would come after. The tweet was short and sweet: "Just setting up my twttr - Jack."
An Internet fad that never seems to die out is also one of the earliest: the makeup tutorial video. Posted by Adrienne Nelson on March 30, 2006, the five-minute tutorial is titled 'Makeup Lessons - LOOK HOT in 5 Minutes or Less....'
In stark contrast to the initial goal of the World Wide Web, today a large share of our time spent on the Internet is dedicated to looking at funny videos and memes that are spread through our social networks and friends. It's hard to say for sure, but most agree that the first "viral video" that really went wild was the iconic 'Shoes' video, a comedy song about buying shoes.
Sources: (WebFX) (CNET) (Mental Floss)
See also: How the Internet changed our lives
The year 1995 also saw the introduction of the first dating site, starting an industry that would become a staple of the digital age. Match.com was developed by Gary Kremen, partly in search for his own love of his life, whom he did eventually end up meeting and marrying through his own website.
The early Internet was fragile to say the least, but that didn't stop large companies from taking advantage of the revolutionary technology. In turn, cyber hoodlums up to no good didn't hesitate to take advantage of those companies. In 2000, a 15-year-old hacker from Quebec in Canada known as Mafiaboy carried out a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against the likes of Amazon, eBay, and CNN, costing a handful of massive companies a collective US$1.5 billion dollars.
While the history of the technologies that led to Wi-Fi is long and convoluted, Wi-Fi as we know it today came about in 1997 after a standardized method of sharing network information via radio waves was approved by the American-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
For many years, email was the leading form of long-distance digital communication, and it all started with a man named Ray Tomlinson, who, in 1971, developed a way to send messages from one computer to another. Unfortunately, there was no big hurrah for the first email, and although Tomlinson never remembered exactly, he guessed the first successful test email was probably just a random selection of numbers.
Long before Facebook, MySpace, or even Friendster, there was Six Degrees. Six Degrees, launched in 1996, was the first true social networking site that allowed people to make personal accounts, build networks with other people, send messages, and share links through the platform.
The Internet is, by far, the most revolutionary innovation of the modern age. It has changed global society and culture from the top to the bottom. The way we work, play, learn, collaborate, wage war, and navigate the world has been fundamentally altered with the advent of this global network that has connected nearly the whole world. Such a revolutionary concept is bound to produce even more innovative ideas, and as the world adapted to a life lived online, earth-shattering milestones were met at a dizzying speed and frequency.
Let's take a walk down memory lane and have a look at some of the most important milestones in the history of the web. Click on!
First spam email sent over 45 years ago: this and more internet milestones
The first of everything done on the Internet
LIFESTYLE Internet
The Internet is, by far, the most revolutionary innovation of the modern age. It has changed global society and culture from the top to the bottom. The way we work, play, learn, collaborate, wage war, and navigate the world has been fundamentally altered with the advent of this global network that has connected nearly the whole world. Such a revolutionary concept is bound to produce even more innovative ideas, and as the world adapted to a life lived online, earth-shattering milestones were met at a dizzying speed and frequency.
Let's take a walk down memory lane and have a look at some of the most important milestones in the history of the web. Click on!