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 20 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 1960s 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.  

Plus, we won't even mention that whole industry wherepeople show their naughty bits.


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.

Vinton Gray Cerf was another founding father of the Internet. He  played a key role in the creation of the Net by developing the TCP/IP protocols we use for the Internet.



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 groupof 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 system 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.


11. Which decade really saw the explosion of the net? 
The 1990s. The Internet exploded into the mainstream with the release of the first popular web browser Mosaic in 1993.  


12. How fast is the Internet growing? 
Very fast! It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet. Source: CyberAtlas.com 


13. Number of Internet Users and Breakdown.
The Internet is roughly 35% English, 65% Non-English with the Chinese at 14%. Yet only 13% of world's population, 812 million are Internet users as of Dec. '04. North America has the highest continental concentration with 70% of the 
people using the Internet. 


14. Country with the highest percentage of net users? 
Sweden at 75%.


15. How big is the Internet's surfing world?
Google's index now stands at over 8 billion pages. There are now over a Billion Internet Users and that number is growing rapidily. 


16. What was the Net's first index called?
Archie, other than library catalogs, this was the first index created in1989 by Peter Deutsch at McGill in Montreal. Although it spouted such others as Veronica and Jughead, Archie was short for Archiver and had nothing to do with the comic strip. Backrub was the original name for Google!  Larry Page and SergeyBrin used this term for their search engine in 1996, Google as we know it debuted in 1998. The name Google is a twist on the word Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

17. What does HTTP stand for?
HyperText Transfer Protocol - it's the protocol for moving files  across the net; it requires two client programs. The HTTP client and the server.


18. What is an ISP?
Internet Service Provider - This is the service or company you use t access the Internet.  


19. What is HTML?
Hypertext Markup Language - it's the coded format language for 
transmitting and creating hypertext web pages. 


20. What are your average surfing habits according to Nielsen 
NetRatings?
Each month you usually visit 59 domains, view 1,050 pages allocating 45 seconds for each page and spend about 25 hours doing all this net activity! Each surfing session lasts 51 minutes. One last thought - Henry Edward Hardy in his Master's Thesis (1993) on 
The History of the Net stated "The Net is Immortal". Ever wonder what this baby will be like in a 100 years? a 1000 years? Just something to think about as you keep your eye on that cursor.