We need it. We love it. We can’t live without it. All hail the Internet!
The internet is a fascinating, wild, and phenomenal creation, and is undoubtedly the most marvelous of modern marvels. Back in the 1960’s, the internet was a military-funded experiment that sought to connect computers to one another.
That need to connect, that deep need to join forces, share information, and learn all that we can about one another has taken root in humanity and is expressed via the internet. Today, billions of us share our thoughts, feelings, data, and resources with the world online, and it is hard, even for those of us who came before Generation Z, to imagine life without it.
Check out this list of amazing internet facts and see just how much you really know about the Internet!
1. The internet is 9110 days old today.
2. If the Internet were weighed, it would weigh about 2 ounces (50 grams). How does one measure the weight of the Internet? Physicist Russel Seitz measured the weight of multiple billions of electrons which make up the data that we send back and forth every day.
3. YouTube uploads 72 hours of video every single minute. Yes, it is mostly people’s pets.
4. The current estimate of internet users is roughly 3.26 billion worldwide, or less than half of Earth’s population.
5. How often do you use Google to search the internet? Google averages nearly 3 billion searches per day.
6. The number of people in China who use the internet (640 million) is double the population of the whole United States.
7. The phrase “internet surfing” was coined by a librarian named Jean Armour Polly in 1992.
8. One of the inventors of web as we know it, Tim Berners-Lee, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
9. Korean rap sensation Psy’s song “Gangnam Style” holds the record for YouTube’s most viewed video ever. It has been viewed more than 2 billion time since July 15, 2012 (which is exactly 4 years ago today!)
10. 87% of people have not heard the term ‘Internet of Things.’
11. It is estimated that by 2020, a quarter of a billion vehicles will have internet connection.
12. China has a treatment camp for people who suffer from internet addiction.
13. The first webcam video is from the University of Cambridge. The subject of the first live video feed? A coffee pot.
14. The majority of internet use is not done by humans, but by malware and internet bots, which account for two-thirds of internet activity.
15. Symbolics.com was the first registered domain.
16. The first spam email that ever went out was from a computer salesman named Gary Thuerk in 1978.
17. Asia accounts for 1.7 billion of the internet’s 3.26 billion users.
18. File sharing and media streaming are responsible for more than half of the traffic on the web.
19. ATMs, which date all the way back to 1974, are considered the first major Internet of Things objects.
20. If the internet were measured in horsepower, it takes 50 million horsepower to run the internet today.