10 Facts About The Internet You Should Know!

You probably use it every day but how well do you know your Internet?

Ever wonder how all this foolishness got started in the first place and why? How big it really is? How many present users there are? The average time spent on a website? Here are 10 facts you might or might not want to know about the Internet.

1. Who coined the phrase 'World Wide Web'?

Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. He's also considered by most people as the person who started the whole thing rolling.

2. How did the Internet Start and Why?

It all started with the time-sharing of IBM computers in the early 60's at universities such as Dartmouth and Berkeley in the States. People would share the same computer for their computing tasks. The Internet also received help from Sputnik! After this Russian Satellite was launched in 1957; President Eisenhower formed ARPA to advance computer networking and communication.

3. Who was J.C.R. Licklider?

Licklider is often referred to as the father of the Internet because his ideas of interactive computing and a "Galactic Network" were the seeds for the Internet. His ideas would be developed thru DARPA,(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1962. Later he would help form ARPANET and the Internet was on it's way.

4. What was ARPANET?

ARPANET stands for 'Advanced Research Projects Agency Network' Came about in the arena of Sputnik and the cold war. The military needed a method of communicating and sharing all the information on computers for research and development. It would also be a handy communication system if all traditional ways were wiped out in a nuclear attack!

5. What was the First long distance Connection?

In 1965 using a low speed dial-up telephone line, MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts working with Thomas Merrill, connected the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California. The phone lines weren't quite up to the task.

6. Who was Leonard Kleinrock?

Kleinrock came up with the theory of packet switching, the basic form of Internet connections. With a group of UCLA graduate students on Oct. 29, 1969, Kleinrock connected with the Stanford Research Institute but as they typed in the G in LOGIN -- the system crashed!

7. What is an Ethernet?

It's a protocol or standards for a set of computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs), the origins of which came from Bob Metcalfe's Harvard's dissertation on "Packet Networks".

8. When was the first mouse introduced?

The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart at the Fall Joint Computer Expo in San Francisco.

9. Did Al Gore really invent the Internet?

No, but give credit where credit is due. He did the most of any elected official to actively promote the Internet. However, he wasn't even in Congress when ARPANET was formed in 1969 or even when the term 'Internet' came into use in 1974. Gore was first elected in 1976.
Gore himself may be the cause of this Urban Legend or Internet myth - during a Wolf Blitzer CNN interview on March 9, 1999 - Al Gore did say: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Causing himself some ridicule but also paving the way for such future one-liners as: "I invented the environment!"

10. Who coined the phrase 'information superhighway'?

Wikipedia says Nam June Paik coined the phrase "information superhighway" in 1974.
Al Gore popularized the phrase in the early 1990's