August 23rd: The Internet

August 23 is “Internaut Day” (from ‘internet’ and ‘astronaut’), the anniversary of the day in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee opened the World Wide Web to the general public. Here are ten facts about the internet.

1. We tend to use the terms "internet" and "world wide web" interchangeably but they are two different things. The internet is a network of computers; the World Wide Web is a way of accessing and sharing information across it.
2. 2.4 billion people use the internet, that's 20% of the population of the world. Over half of the world's internet users live in Asia - 1.7 billion of them. When you add up the number of PCs, laptops, phones etc. which are connected to the internet there are over 8.7 billion of them. So there are more machines connected to the internet than there are people on Earth. It's big enough even to have its own patron saint - St Isidor of Seville, who wrote a 20-volume encyclopedia in the 7th century.
3. Now for some words. The word "internet" first appeared in 1974 in a booklet called "Internet Transmission Control Program". It is short for "internetworking" or "inter-system networking." The term ‘surfing the Internet’ was coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992. The term URL for a web address stands for Uniform Resource Locator.
4. It takes 50 million brake horsepower worth of electrical power to keep the internet running for a day. However, a physicist called Russel Seitz, who clearly had some time on his hands, calculated, using atomic physics theory, the weight of the billions of electrons buzzing around the system. According to his calculation the internet weighs 50 grams, or 2 ounces, which is about the weight of a strawberry. The stored data, all five million Terabytes of it, if taken out of the devices housing it, would weigh less than a grain of sand.
5. We use the internet for all kinds of things now, including webcams, which can show us what the snow is like in a Ski resort on the other side of the world, or someone's face when you Skype them. The first ever webcam was set up by a bunch of students in Cambridge to watch a coffee machine - so they'd know when their Coffee was ready.
6. Then there's email. The first ever was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer, who also first used the @ symbol to show the mail was intended for a human and not a machine. And the message? It can't have seemed important or historic at the time, because he can't remember. Over 3 million emails are sent every second. That's 247 billion a day. It probably won't surprise you to learn that 81% of it is spam. That's been around since 1978 when DEC released a new computer and operating system, and decided to send a mass email to 600 users. Who didn't appreciate it at all. Why it's called spam nobody is entirely sure but one theory is that some people playing a text adventure game got bored with it and programmed their keyboards to type in "Spam spam spam spam spam spam", imitating the Monty Python sketch.
7. There's internet dating, too, which is now the most popular way of meeting a significant other. 20% of couples getting hitched today first met on the internet.
8. Ever wonder what would happen to the internet if there was a nuclear war, Asteroid strike or zombie apocalypse? If a major catastrophe ever shut down the internet, there is a plan in place. There are seven people (I don't know who they are - it's probably a closely guarded secret) who have "the key to the internet" and would be able to get it going again.
9. How many websites are there? About 637 million, including over 250 million blogs. The internet is theoretically available in every country of the world but in some places it's severely restricted by the government. Like in North Korea, and to a lesser extent, China. Each country has a suffix to use to identify its websites - for example, .uk for Britain, and .ca for Canada. When Montenegro declared independence from Yugoslavia in 2006, its Internet domain suffix changed from .yu to .me.
10. The web has been the fastest growing method of communication in human history. It took just four years to reach 50 million users. Television took more than a decade to achieve that. However, in the early days, not everyone believed it was going to take off. In 1995, Newsweek published an article saying there was no way people were going to use it to get information or buy things. The article is available to read. Guess where? On their website.

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