25 years ago on August 23, the World Wide Web was born with the first published page that could be accessed online. Although the Internet is technically different from the World Wide Web, to most people it is synonymous. The “web” is actually built on top of the Internet, which is merely a network of nodes spanning the globe. We access the web on our browsers using the power of the Internet’s connectivity, if that makes sense.
Nevertheless, “the www” is celebrating its 25th birthday sometime now so it’s time we took stock of what’s really out there in the world wide web that has become an integral part of our daily lives.
Fascinating Facts about the World Wide Web
- The world wide web was launched in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee who created the world’s first webpage
- There are currently 3.4 billion users of the Internet, and we’re apparently called Internauts, which roughly translates into “Internet travellers”
- 50% of those users have a Facebook account
- The world wide web hosts no less than 1 BILLION websites
- In 2015, nearly half of the world’s internet traffic was generated by bots, not humans
- The Internet is home to approximately 4.73 billion webpages
- Those billions of pages account for 1 zettabyte of data, which equals 1 TRILLION GIGABYTES
- The fastest average Internet connection in the world is found in South Korea – 26.7 Mbps
- Average connection speed in the United States is 14.2 Mbps
- 60% of the world’s population still does not have access to the Internet
- Did you know there were Internet rehab centers in China? 24 million kids are known to be internet addicts.
- You can get high-speed internet at Mount Everest’s base camp at 17,000 feet above sea level
- When Montenegro gained independence from Yugoslavia, their domain name went from .yu to .me
- 10% of American internet users think HTML is a sexually transmitted disease. It’s not, by the way. It is the language that most webpages are written in.
- The world’s first online transaction was Stanford students buying marijuana from MIT students
- There are more internet users in India than the entire population of the United States
- NASA’s private internet connections operate at a blazing 91 Gbps – or 13,000 times faster than the average internet connection in the U.S.
- According to the United Nations, disconnecting someone from the Internet is human rights violation
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