20 First Events in Internet History

Have you ever stopped to think about what was the first video posted on YouTube? Or what was the first game available on the App Store? However distant these events may seem, everything always happens a first time.

The Internet was developed over many years and the websites we know today at some point started from scratch. There was a time when there was only one video on YouTube, and only one post on Instagram.

We decided to do some research into Internet history and found 20 super interesting facts about things that happened for the first time.

On August 6, 1991, the first website appeared on the Internet. Its creator was Tim Berners-Lee and the address was: http://info.cern.ch. Today, it is archived. The site had information about the network, how to get a browser, how to connect to the Internet, and much more.

In 1992, the creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, published in world wide web (and World Wide Web) the first image. In the photo appears the pop band called Les Horribles Cernettes. The women are employees of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where Berners-Lee worked.

The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer at BBB Technologies. Tomlinson sent the email from one computer to another next door over the ARPANET network. Unfortunately, Ray doesn’t remember the exact text of the message. Years later, he said he had written something quite simple, like: QWERTYUIOP.

Archie was the first Internet search engine. It was created on September 10, 1990 to index files from FTP servers. The archived version of the finder was published at the University of Warsaw and still works. The name Archie is just the word Archive without the ‘v’. In Brazil, perhaps you remember, the first search engine was Cadê, launched in 1995.

The first search engine for websites was called Wandex. It was developed by Matthew Gray in 1993 using the World Wide Web Wanderer indexer. These days Matthew Gray works at Google.

On October 27, 1994, Joe McCambley posted the first banner ad in Internet history on HotWired.com. It was an ad about 7 museums sponsored by the AT&T company. The text read: ‘Have you already clicked your mouse here? You go’.

The first website with the ‘.com’ domain was the website of the American computer manufacturer Symbolics. This happened on March 15, 1985. Although the company ceased to exist in 1996, the website still works.

Programmer Kevin Systrom, creator of Instagram, published the first photo on his profile on July 17, 2010. In the photo, we see his girlfriend’s foot and a golden retriever dog found in Mexico by Kevin.

The first YouTube video was posted on April 23, 2005. It was uploaded by Jawed Karim, one of the site’s creators. The video is amateur, made in a zoo in San Diego, USA. After 2 years, YouTube released the Spanish version. On June 19, 2007, in Spain, and on October 11 of the same year, in Mexico. The launch date of YouTube in each country you can see here.

The eBay website was created by programmer Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. At that time, eBay was called AuctionWeb. That same year, the first object was sold on the site. Someone bought a laser pointer from Omidyar for $14.83. The buyer’s identity was known only in 2015. His name is Mark Fraser and he still has the purchased object.

The phrase was uttered in April 2003 by one of the creators of the service, a man from Estonia. The phrase was as follows: “Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?”, which means “Hi, are you listening to me?”

The first tweet was made on March 21, 2006 by Twiiter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

It stands to reason that Mark Zuckerberg was the first to have a Facebook profile. The first account by a person who was not involved in creating the site was Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard University.

The first spam happened on May 1, 1978. Messages with the same text were sent to ARPANET networks. Little is known about the author of the spam, only that his web name was Thuerk. The content of the messages was completely innocent: all users of the ARPANET received an invitation to the presentation of the next product from the company DEC.

On March 18, 1999, a Seattle student, Brad Fitzpatrick, wrote his first LiveJournal post. Until April 2000 people could not leave comments.

The first paid application placed on the App Store was a Sega game called Super Monkey Ball. This happened in 2008. The game became very popular and can still be downloaded. The first free app on the App Store was eBay’s mobile version.

Wikipedia’s current format was officially inaugurated on January 15, 2001. The photo shown above is of the older edition. In the early 2000s, during the transition to more advanced technology, the track record was lost. Therefore, today it is impossible to see the first article.

On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, proposed using the sequence of symbols 🙂 as a smiley face. It was also his idea to use 🙁 which, in the beginning, was just used to flag important phrases in text messages.

On June 27, 1994, the CompuServe website provided its followers with the first song available on the Internet for download. It was Aerosmith’s songHead First’🇧🇷 The 4.3 megabytes that today download in about 3 minutes took 60 to 90 minutes back then.