10 Things you probably didn’t know about the internet

Posted on 13 July 2022

You might be pretty confident about surfing the web, downloading email attachments and scrolling through social networks sharing things that interest you but here are 10 facts about the Internet you might not know about our wide area network.

The Internet was created in the 1960’s

In the late 60’s the US created the Internet. It was no where near as big as it is now but

The world wide web was created in the 1980’s

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. Not as we know it today though.

Google was meant to be BackRub

And googol… just Google it to know more…

It’s a 50/50 population between us and robots

The internet is full of bots. Might even be more than that now but more on that shortly.

The first webcam was used to monitor a coffee pot

It’s true – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

The amazon logo is saying you can have anything from A to Z

So they say.

The internet isn’t so much of a web as some people think

It’s not, the initial idea was that if war meant one site was taken out, other sites could be reachable (as in physical site) but there have been times where undersea fibre cable breaks have taken down websites all over the globe for hours.

Every website is powered by a server on 24/7

It is indeed. Sometimes even more, when a page is requested it needs to come from somewhere.

We’ve ran out of IP addresses

Well IANA has but there are still a few around to buy and lease, at least that is the case for IPv4 but with only 4,294,967,296 it’s not surprising. IPv6 on the other hand…

340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

This post was actually started as a draft in 2018 😲

Yes. It really is true, this post is 4 years old and at the time we had decided to write something else… it happens.

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