The World Wide Web or simply Web has been with us for almost thirty years. With all these years, there must be a great history of it. Lots of historical activities have taken place within it and quite a number of them are worth remembering. Also, there are some mind-boggling titbits about the World Wide Web. Here are the 15 interesting facts about world wide web that you should know.
Interesting facts about the World Wide Web
1. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was written in 1989
A British engineer and a scientist by the name Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal of what would become the World Wide Web in 1989. Currently, the engineer is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
2. Mosaic web browser was launched in 1993
1993 is believed to be a very important year in the history of the World Wide Web. It was the year which the Mosaic web browser was launched. This was a graphical web browser that was developed by a team of experts at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic is one browser that is heavily credited for the huge popularity of the world wide web.
3. The first website went live on August 6 1991
Berners-Lee and a team of other engineers who worked at CERN launched the first ever website in 1991. the domain name of the site is http://info.cern.ch and its landing page had only 153 words. This was historic as it marked a new beginning of the World Wide Web where hypermedia information can be easily accessed.
Also, Read: 10 Interesting Websites on the Internet
4. The Freedom Ring
In 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web technology will be available to everyone free of charge. The declaration meant that the main components of this technology will remain in the public domain. This means that anyone regardless of the location will be free to use these components.
5. Archie was the first search engine
Archie was the first-ever search engine. It went live in 1990. From there, other search engines such as Google, and Yahoo were developed.
6. Web Surfing
The term “ Surf the internet” was invented by a New York librarian who was going by the moniker Net-mom. Later on, surfing the internet became an acceptable term ins the World Wide Web.
7. The internet is not Web and the Web is not internet
Most people assume that the two mean one thing. Even those in the tech world seem to have the same thought. The truth of the matter is the two are completely different things. The internet was already there long before the World Wide Web came into existence.
8. Billions of people surf the web daily
It is estimated that at least more than 3 billion of the worlds population surf the web daily. The high number of people who surf have been boosted by the improved accessibility of the internet worldwide.
9. China rocks the web most followed by India
According to the most recent statistics, China leads as a country with the most active web surfers. It is then followed by India then America.
10. There are more than 1.8 billion websites
This is according to the 2018 survey that was released by Netcraft Web Server Survey. However, only a small fraction of those websites receive visitors.
11. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. This consortium was founded by Tim Berners-Lee.
12. Pornography forms the biggest chunk of the World Wide Web. This is despite the fact that the first website that used .xxx domain went live in 2011.
13. The first photo was posted on the web in the year 1992.
14. NeXT computer that was used by Tim Berners-Lee automatically became the first web server. It was also the first computer to write the web browser
15. The number of devices connected to the web exceeds that of the human population.
