The Internet was originally born out of sheer panic of the United States after the launch of Sputnik 1 from the Soviets. Its aim was to further the chances of America surviving a catastrophic Soviet nuclear attack and also satisfy the need for faster knowledge transfer.
But today the internet stands for something very different. It has now become much larger, more influential and integral than any technology developed before.
The Internet has been around since the 1970s but the public only gained access in 1991 but as with everything there’s been a few key moments that would lead to what it is today.
But what are those key moments and what are the stories behind the individuals and moments that would become the first steps in an incredible time for human history.
In this episode you hopefully learn something new and have a little bit of fun along the way we’ll go through the history of the internet.
Table of Contents
First Email on Internet
Looking at key moments that would change the world although somewhat disputed the general consensus is that the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971.
There is a quote from him in an interview “I was actually working on a mail program but it was programmed for a single computer so that you could send messages from yourself to another user on the same time sharing computer and I had written a couple of programs to transfer files and it occurred to me that since the mailbox that I was sending these messages to was nothing more than a file. I could send that file across the
network instead of keeping it within the same machine and so I put two programs together modified, code a little bit then.
The first email program was was created ironically what would become one of the most popular applications on the Internet.
Tomlinson wrote on his own time it just seemed like an interesting thing to do with a computer in the network and so I just did it the funny thing is that he wrote the program for email in his own time and nobody at the company really cared about it. It was also rather pioneered these of the outside for the email.
First Website on Internet
The first website came online in late 1990 at the time Tim berners-lee was working at CERN laboratories. He wanted to make the internet easier to use.
He wanted to link information together and let users browser twirl by themselves. What he had in mind was the World Wide Web. Well it was 1989 and the Internet already existed and that you could send email but there was no websites, no Gmail there was no space or things you could click through and it began because I was frustrated it didn’t exist and my imagined a system where you could just click from one to the other and that was so compelling that I decided that I wanted to build it.
On the 20th o f December 1990 the first web page was put up. It was the first time the internet was within reach of the average person, everybody could use it.
The first web page was simply a little bit of a guide as to what the world wide web is and how to use it. The original page no longer exists but later copy from 1992 can be found at this web address.
Here’s a fun fact as it turns out the world wide web was built on a next computer and it was Steve Jobs who founded the company ‘Next’ during his time away from Apple after being fired in 1985. If Steve Jobs hadn’t been fired, we may not have the web as we know. It’s pretty interesting how things link together.
First Picture on Internet
So what was the first picture uploaded on the web?
Again, it was Tim berners-lee and this time for a bit of fun in 1990 some of Tim’s fellow employees at CERN formed a parody band one day in 1992 Tim asked to scan some of the photos and said that he wanted to publish them on some information system called the World Wide Web that he’d just invented.
They didn’t really think much of it and they handed over the photos, little did they know that this was going to be a historic moment.
First Search Engine on Internet
What about the first search engine?
Although internet search engines had been around for awhile even before the World Wide Web. They were very limited in nature and only contained a few pages.
The first search engine on the web was Archie Query Form.
First Web Browser on Internet
The first full text web browser search engine like the ones we have today is something that you’ve probably never heard about. It was called web crawler and was launched back in 1994. It was there until three and a half years. Later when Google arrived on the scene that web crawler basically faded into obscurity.
Conclusion
The list of first thing ever happened on Internet is still not complete. I will keep updating the list with the latest first things happening on the Web. So, stay tuned.
Happy a happy access to the Internet…
