126 Fun Facts About Internet

What word was a UCLA programmer typing in 1969 when the ARPANET system crashed after two letters?

Login: only the 'l' and the 'o' went through before the crash, so the network's first message was 'lo'; a full login worked about an hour later.

Which US government department funded the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet?

Department of Defense: the network was paid for by its Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had been set up in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

The first successful host-to-host ARPANET connection in 1969 linked UCLA with which other site?

Stanford Research Institute: Douglas Engelbart's lab there went on to run the network's information center, which kept the table of host names and addresses.

Who created the email addressing format separating mailbox name from host name with an @ sign, in 1971?

Ray Tomlinson: he picked the @ sign because it never appeared in usernames and naturally read as 'user at host'.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?

CERN: to win over staff, the lab put its telephone directory on the Web, and that dull listing became the new system's first popular use.

Godwin's law says that as an online argument grows longer, someone will eventually be compared to whom?

Adolf Hitler: yet in 2017 Mike Godwin himself urged people to compare the far-right marchers in Charlottesville to Nazis.

At which event did Tim Berners-Lee live-tweet the words 'This is for everyone'?

London Olympics: the words also lit up around the stadium, spelled out in lights across the audience.

What does the 'S' in HTTPS stand for?

Secure: in 2014 Google began using HTTPS as a signal in its search rankings, giving encrypted sites a small boost.

NCSA Mosaic, the 1993 browser that popularised the Web, was built at which Midwestern university?

Illinois: Marc Andreessen, who co-wrote Mosaic there, left to co-found Netscape, maker of the rival Navigator browser.

Which web browser reached a peak usage share of about 95% in 2003?

Internet Explorer: by 2010 its share had sunk below 60%, as Firefox and Google Chrome drew users away.

Mozilla's Firefox browser launched in 2002 under the name of which mythical bird?

Phoenix: trademark trouble forced a switch to Firebird, and when a database project with that name objected, the browser became Firefox.

Google built its Chrome browser on WebKit, a rendering engine from which company?

Apple: in 2013 Google broke away and forked WebKit into its own engine, Blink, which Chrome still runs on.

Which animal do you play as in the game Google Chrome shows when you're offline?

A T. rex: its designer said the dinosaur was a joke that losing your connection sends you back to the 'prehistoric age'.

What was Google nicknamed while it was still a Stanford research project?

The name referred to the way it analysed backlinks; the founders later renamed it after the number googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

When Google was set up in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used whose garage as an office?

Susan Wojcicki: their landlord later joined Google herself and went on to become YouTube's CEO.

Google's first outside investment, a $100,000 cheque in 1998, came from a co-founder of which company?

Sun Microsystems: co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim handed over the cheque before Google Inc. had even been incorporated.

The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?

Burning Man: that out-of-office note started a tradition that had grown to more than 5,000 Doodles by 2024.

In 2015 Google reorganised itself as a subsidiary of which newly created parent company?

Alphabet: in the same shake-up Sundar Pichai became Google's CEO, while Larry Page moved up to lead the parent company.

Who launched Wikipedia in 2001 together with Larry Sanger?

Jimmy Wales: the wiki first went online under his older encyclopedia's web address, then moved to its own site within days.

Wikipedia began as a side project feeding into which expert-written online encyclopaedia?

Nupedia: its expert review was so slow that fewer than two dozen articles were finished by January 2001, when the wiki was started to speed things up.

What was Amazon's original company name?

Cadabra: Bezos changed it within months, after his lawyer raised objections to the name.

Jeff Bezos moved from New York City to which Washington city to start Amazon as an online bookstore?

Bellevue: Bezos and a handful of employees built the site in his garage there before it sold its first book in July 1995.

What was the first item ever sold on eBay's predecessor AuctionWeb, in 1995?

A broken laser pointer: it fetched $14.83 from a buyer who knew it didn't work.

Yahoo's name is often explained as a backronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious' what?

Oracle: yet Jerry Yang and David Filo say they chose the name because they liked its meaning, 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'.

Which classifieds website began as an email service about events in the San Francisco Bay Area?

Craigslist: Craig Newmark's email service later became a website that spread to hundreds of cities worldwide.

YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?

PayPal: Google later bought the trio's new company, YouTube, for $1.65 billion.

'Me at the zoo', the first YouTube video, uploaded in April 2005, was filmed at which zoo?

San Diego Zoo: in 2013 the clip's star, co-founder Jawed Karim, went on YouTube to protest its new rule tying comments to Google+.

Which video first reached a billion YouTube views, in December 2012?

Gangnam Style: its views later outgrew the biggest number YouTube's 32-bit view counter could store, so the site upgraded it.

When 'TheFacebook' launched on 4 February 2004, it was open only to students of which university?

Harvard: months earlier, Mark Zuckerberg's site Facemash, which asked students to rate classmates' looks, had landed him in trouble with the university.

Facebook's thumbs-up Like button, introduced in 2009, had been popularised earlier on which social site?

FriendFeed: after borrowing the feature, Facebook bought FriendFeed itself that August.

Twitter was launched in 2006 under what five-letter working name?

The vowel-free spelling was inspired by Flickr and by the five-character length of US SMS short codes; the twitter.com domain was bought six months later.

Tweets were first capped at 140 characters to fit inside what?

Text message: the cap stayed until 2017, when Twitter doubled it to 280 characters.

Who first proposed using the hashtag to group topics on Twitter, in a 2007 tweet?

Chris Messina: Twitter didn't adopt it at first, but it caught on months later when people used it to tag updates on Southern California's 2007 fires.

Instagram started life as a mobile check-in app with what name?

Burbn: after raising $500,000 for it in 2010, its makers reworked the app to focus on photos.

Which messaging app did Facebook buy in 2014 for about $19 billion?

WhatsApp: back in 2009 Facebook had turned down its co-founder Brian Acton for a job.

Reddit was founded in 2005 by two roommates from which university?

Virginia: in 2006, the year after launching the site, the former roommates sold it to the publisher Condé Nast.

Reddit's founders first pitched a food-ordering idea; which startup investor steered them toward Reddit instead?

Paul Graham: he was unconvinced by the ordering idea, but his startup programme Y Combinator took the pair in to build Reddit.

Which company bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005?

News Corp: after the site lost its lead to Facebook, it sold Myspace in 2011 for about $35 million.

The name of the 1996 instant messenger ICQ was a play on which phrase?

I seek you: AOL bought the messenger and its Israeli maker, Mirabilis, in 1998, two years after launch.

Scott Fahlman proposed the :-) smiley in 1982 on the bulletin board of which university?

Carnegie Mellon: he suggested marking jokes after a humorous post on the department's message board was taken as a real safety warning.

The word 'spam' for junk email comes from a sketch by which comedy troupe?

Monty Python: in the 1970 sketch a café crams Spam into almost every dish, and a chorus of Vikings drowns out the diners by chanting its name.

The first documented spam, sent over the ARPANET in 1978, advertised computers from which company?

DEC: the agency running ARPANET called the message a flagrant violation, since the network was meant for official US government business only.

Browser cookies take their name from which older Unix programming term?

Magic cookie: Lou Montulli said he had heard the term in a college operating-systems course and liked 'cookies' for aesthetic reasons.

Which band sued Napster in 2000 after a demo of its song 'I Disappear' circulated there?

Metallica: its lawyers delivered close to 60,000 pages naming more than 335,000 users that the band wanted Napster to block.

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Denmark: Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the nickname as a temporary codename, likening the king's uniting of his realm to a standard uniting different devices.

Which country's national science agency patented the wireless networking technology behind modern Wi-Fi?

Australia: its agency CSIRO went on to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from the patent.

Ethernet, named by Robert Metcalfe in a 1973 memo, was developed at which research centre?

Xerox PARC: Robert Metcalfe later left and in 1979 founded 3Com, which turned Ethernet into a business.

IPv4, version 4 of the Internet Protocol, provides roughly how many unique addresses?

4.3 billion: the central free pool ran dry in February 2011, when the last blocks went to the five regional registries.

Which was the first .com domain ever registered, on 15 March 1985?

symbolics.com: the computer maker behind it later went defunct, and in 2009 the domain was sold to a domain investment company.

Which Pacific island nation earns millions licensing its internet domain to video sites?

Tuvalu: the first money from its .tv domain helped pay the fees for joining the United Nations.

Vint Cerf shares the title 'father of the Internet' with which co-developer of TCP/IP?

Robert Kahn: in 1972 he showed off the ARPANET to the public by linking 20 different computers at an international computing conference.

Which British computer scientist coined the term 'packet switching' in the 1960s?

Donald Davies: after his team's paper at a 1967 conference, the ARPANET's planners adopted the word 'packet' from his lab's work.

The 1988 Morris worm was written by a graduate student at which university?

Cornell: Robert Tappan Morris became the first person convicted under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The ILOVEYOU worm that spread worldwide by email in May 2000 was written in which country?

Philippines: charges against its author were dropped, but the case led the country to pass a law covering computer crimes.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, pointed at what?

A coffee pot: the feed was later put on the Web, where the pot became famous around the world.

Archie, often called the first internet search engine, was built at which Montreal university?

McGill: Alan Emtage wrote it while working as a systems administrator there, to track down software stored on FTP servers.

The Gopher protocol, a menu-driven rival to the early Web, was released in 1991 by which university?

Minnesota: its menu system spread fast in the early 1990s, but it was almost entirely swept aside by the Web.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was created in 1988 at a university in which country?

Finland: Jarkko Oikarinen wrote it at the University of Oulu to make a local bulletin board system more usable.

Skype was built by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four developers from which Baltic country?

Estonia: Microsoft went on to buy Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine takes its name from a time-travel device in which cartoon?

Rocky and Bullwinkle: in the show, Mr. Peabody and Sherman visit history in their WABAC machine, pronounced 'way-back'.

Which company started in 1997 by renting DVDs through the mail?

Netflix: its mail-order and streaming services helped push the video-rental giant Blockbuster into bankruptcy in 2010.

The dot-com bubble peaked in March 2000, when which stock index hit a record 5,048?

Nasdaq: by October 2002 it had lost more than three-quarters of its value.

'Eternal September' describes the 1993 flood of ISP users onto which discussion system?

Usenet: veterans were used to a wave of new students every September, but from 1993 the flood of newcomers never let up.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave to label what?

Automobile parts: Masahiro Hara's team gave the corner markers the black-white ratio rarest in printed matter, 1:1:3:1:1.

The 'T' in CAPTCHA stands for what kind of test?

Turing: Luis von Ahn later repurposed CAPTCHAs so that each word people typed helped digitise old books.

'Podcast' is a portmanteau of 'broadcast' and which device?

iPod: Ben Hammersley floated 'podcasting' in a 2004 Guardian article as just one possible name, alongside 'audioblogging'.

Who coined the word 'weblog' for an online journal in 1997?

Jorn Barger: in 1999 Peter Merholz jokingly split 'weblog' in two on his site, offering 'blog' for short.

Rickrolling began in 2007 when a user of which site linked Rick Astley's video in place of a GTA IV trailer?

4chan: the prank grew out of 'duckrolling', an earlier bait-and-switch joke that was popular on the same site.

The V.90 dial-up modem standard allowed download speeds of up to what?

56 kbit/s: it replaced two rival, incompatible 56k systems, X2 and K56Flex, and many of their modems could be upgraded to it.

In 2001, AOL, then the world's largest online service, bought which media giant?

Time Warner: the merged company later spun AOL off again as an independent company.

Since 2016 the AP Stylebook has recommended writing the word 'internet' how?

New technologies tend to be capitalised at first and lose the capital as they become everyday words, as 'Telephone' once did.

Which UCLA graduate student began the Request for Comments (RFC) series in 1969?

Steve Crocker: the notes began as a way to record unofficial ideas, yet RFCs became the official documents that define internet standards.

ALOHAnet, funded in 1969, sent data by radio between seven computers on four islands in which US state?

Professor Norman Abramson's design at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa influenced later Ethernet work.

Which two places outside the US were connected to the ARPANET in 1973?

Norway and the United Kingdom: Norway's seismic array used the link mainly to send data to US analysts, and the British node was connected through Norway.

Which French research network, led by Louis Pouzin, first put the end-to-end principle into practice?

CYCLADES: letting the host computers, not the network, fix errors made the design simpler and faster, an idea later built into the internet.

Graduate students at which university started a news-sharing network in 1979 by swapping posts with nearby Chapel Hill?

Duke: Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis's system, run over dial-up links, grew into a worldwide network of discussion groups.

Almost all internet data crossing between continents travels through which kind of link?

Undersea cables carry almost all of it, because fibre moves far more data at a fraction of the cost. US regulator figures put satellites at just 0.37% of the country's international capacity.

Which monarch sent an email over the ARPANET in 1976, the first by any head of state?

Queen Elizabeth II sent the message on 26 March 1976 from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in England, more than a decade before the World Wide Web existed.

Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz famously paid 10,000 bitcoins in 2010 for two of what?

Pizzas, two of them from Papa John's, became the first notable goods bought with bitcoin. The date, 22 May, is now marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

The 2015 viral photo known as 'the dress' split the internet; what colours was the real garment?

Blue and black, as retailer Roman Originals confirmed: it sold no white-and-gold version at the time. The dress sold out within 30 minutes once the photo spread.

Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is mostly blue because of which condition of his?

Colour blindness shaped the palette: Zuckerberg is red-green colour-blind, which he discovered from a test taken around 2007, three years after the site launched.

The Firefox browser shares its name with a nickname for which Asian mammal?

Red panda is the animal the nickname 'firefox' usually means, yet the creature in the browser's logo is a stylised fox.

In Italian, the @ sign in email addresses is nicknamed 'chiocciola', the word for which animal?

Snail is how Italians picture the symbol's spiral. Dutch speakers call it a 'monkey's tail', and Germans have called it a 'spider monkey'.

A plain photo of what became the most-liked post on Instagram in 2019, overtaking Kylie Jenner?

An egg, posted by the account world_record_egg, held the record for almost four years. It was finally overtaken in December 2022 by Lionel Messi's World Cup celebration photo.

A British polar ship that the public voted to call 'Boaty McBoatface' was instead named after whom?

David Attenborough got the honour even though the joke name won the 2016 online poll with 124,109 votes. Boaty McBoatface lives on as a robotic submarine carried aboard the ship.

The original 1996 promotional website for which family film stayed online, unchanged, for 25 years?

Space Jam kept spacejam.com active and untouched until 2021, when the sequel's trailer arrived. Even then, the 1996 pages were preserved on a separate landing page.

Which biologist coined the word 'meme' in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene?

Richard Dawkins shortened the Greek-rooted 'mimeme' because he wanted a one-syllable word that sounded a bit like 'gene'. He meant ideas that spread by imitation, decades before online jokes took the name.

Which Oscars host's 2014 selfie with a dozen stars broke the retweet record within forty minutes?

Ellen DeGeneres staged the shot mid-ceremony, and it was retweeted over 1.8 million times in the first hour and more than 2 million times by the end of the show.

Nyan Cat, the 2011 animation of a flying cat that leaves a rainbow trail, has a body made of what?

A Pop-Tart forms the torso because two viewers of artist Christopher Torres's charity livestream asked him to draw a 'Pop Tart' and a 'cat'. He drew both at once.

Which lip-syncing app did ByteDance buy for nearly $1 billion and merge into TikTok in 2018?

Musical.ly was a startup headquartered in Shanghai with an office in Santa Monica. On 2 August 2018 its accounts and data were folded into TikTok, which kept its own name.

Which search engine, launched in 1997, was fronted by a cartoon valet?

Ask Jeeves borrowed its mascot from P. G. Wodehouse's fictional manservant. The valet was dropped in February 2006, when the search engine was renamed Ask.

Which actor beat CNN in a 2009 race to become the first Twitter user with a million followers?

Ashton Kutcher hit the mark on 16 April 2009, winning what the site billed as its 'Million followers contest'. He later handed the running of his account to a team at his media company.

Luis von Ahn, the Guatemalan inventor of reCAPTCHA, went on to co-found which language-learning app?

Duolingo is the second act of a man who had already sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009.

A CD of which singer's Ten Summoner's Tales was the first item securely bought over the internet?

Sting's CD changed hands on 11 August 1994 for $12.48 plus shipping. The New York Times marked the sale with the headline 'Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open'.

The '419' advance-fee email scam takes its number from the criminal code of which country?

Nigeria's criminal code deals with fraud in section 419. The trick is far older than email: it resembles the 'Spanish Prisoner' letters of the late 18th century.

Tor, the network that wraps web traffic in layers of encryption, is named after which vegetable?

Onion routing, developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s, gave Tor its name. Traffic is wrapped in nested encryption and passed through three relays.

A 2005 viral clip of a player charging in shouting 'Leeroy Jenkins' came from which online game?

World of Warcraft guild Pals for Life released the clip in May 2005. While his teammates carefully plan the fight, Leeroy is away from his computer preparing a plate of chicken.

Which band released its 2007 album In Rainbows as a download and let fans choose their own price?

Radiohead made the first pay-what-you-want release by a major act, setting off a debate about what it meant for the music industry. The band has not used the system again.

By which name is the unidentified author of the 2008 paper that introduced Bitcoin known?

Satoshi Nakamoto posted the paper to a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008. In 2011 he emailed a fellow developer that he had 'moved on to other things' and was never heard from again.

The slang term for luring someone online with a fake identity comes from which 2010 documentary?

Catfish follows Nev Schulman, himself a victim of the trick. The title comes from a scene in which the deceiver's husband compares her to a catfish shipped alongside live cod.

World Emoji Day is held on 17 July because that date is displayed on which emoji?

Calendar is the emoji behind the date: on iPhones it shows 17 July, so Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge chose that day when he created the celebration in 2014.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name as its Word of the Year for 2015?

Face with Tears of Joy won because, Oxford said, it 'best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015'. Slate's Katy Waldman countered that the emoji was 'less of a word'.

Bell Labs engineers adding keys to the phone keypad in the 1960s coined which name for the hashtag symbol?

Octothorpe, also spelled octothorp, was coined by 1968 because the eleventh and twelfth keys being added to the keypad needed names. Unicode still lists it among the symbol's attested names.

Which US politician popularised the term 'information superhighway' for fast networks in the 1990s?

Al Gore was calling a planned national research network the 'information superhighway' by 1991. Wired's style guide says he first used the phrase in 1978, in homage to his senator father.

Which science-fiction author coined the word 'cyberspace' and used it in his 1984 novel Neuromancer?

William Gibson first used it in a 1982 short story, two years before Neuromancer. He later admitted the word had seemed 'evocative and essentially meaningless' when he coined it.

On MySpace, which co-founder was automatically added as every new member's first friend?

Tom Anderson, nicknamed 'Myspace Tom', greeted every newcomer until 2010. His slot then went to a profile called 'Today On MySpace', which abbreviates neatly to T.O.M.

Which children's virtual world did Disney buy in 2007 for about $350 million?

Club Penguin's creators were promised up to $350 million more if the game hit growth targets by 2009. It missed them, so Disney never paid the bonus.

Blogger Kyle MacDonald made 14 online trades, starting with one red paperclip, and ended with what?

A house in Kipling, Saskatchewan, was the fourteenth and final trade, swapped for a role in a film. The town put up a giant red paperclip sculpture to mark the deal.

British student Alex Tew set out to fund his degree in 2005 by selling a million of what for a dollar each?

Pixels on his Million Dollar Homepage sold in blocks of 100, and the last 1,000 were auctioned for $38,100. Tew then dropped out of the degree the site was meant to fund.

Which game-streaming site, bought by Amazon for $970 million, began as a spin-off of Justin.tv?

Twitch launched in June 2011 as the gaming offshoot of a site where founder Justin Kan had broadcast his own life around the clock, popularising the term 'lifecasting'.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield built which workplace chat app inside his failed game Glitch?

Slack started as the internal chat tool at Butterfield's studio Tiny Speck. He said the name stood for 'Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge'.

Which Microsoft encyclopedia, sold on CD-ROM from 1993, was discontinued in 2009?

Encarta existed only because Encyclopædia Britannica rejected Microsoft's 1985 offer to make a CD-ROM edition, feeling it would not fit with its print business.

Which actress played an analyst whose identity is erased in the 1995 internet thriller The Net?

Sandra Bullock's character, Angela Bennett, becomes a target after she stumbles on a backdoor hidden in a widely used computer-security system.

The 'Dancing Baby', an early viral animation of the 1990s, turned up on which legal comedy-drama?

Ally McBeal used the baby in its fantasy sequences, which show the characters' wishful thinking. The animation began as a sample file for a 3D animation package released in 1996.

What is the name of the time-travelling alien with an antenna that serves as Reddit's mascot?

Snoo began as a doodle that co-founder Alexis Ohanian drew while bored in a marketing class. He first wanted to call the alien S'new, a play on 'What's new?'.

The banner ad widely described as the web's first, on HotWired in 1994, was bought by which company?

AT&T paid for a little rectangle that asked 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.' About 44 percent of the people who saw it clicked.

Which Microsoft chatbot was pulled from Twitter in 2016 after just 16 hours of offensive tweets?

Tay had tweeted more than 96,000 times before the plug was pulled. Microsoft blamed a 'coordinated attack by a subset of people' who had exploited a vulnerability in the bot.

Winners of which annual internet awards are limited to acceptance speeches of just five words?

The Webbys honoured Black Lives Matter in 2015, when co-founder Opal Tometi spent her five words on 'Stay turnt: Black Lives Matter'.

At the 1990 Interop show, John Romkey hooked up which kitchen appliance to the internet?

A toaster was the showpiece Romkey connected with Simon Hackett, nine years before the phrase 'Internet of things' was coined. A Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon had been on the ARPANET since 1982.

Cloudflare's San Francisco headquarters keeps a wall of what to help it generate random numbers?

Lava lamps work because their blobs of warm wax move in chaotic patterns; a camera watches around 100 of them in the lobby. Cloudflare calls the display the Wall of Entropy.

The meme 'All your base are belong to us' comes from the badly translated intro of which video game?

Zero Wing was a 1989 arcade game, and the line appeared in the European Mega Drive version of 1991. A truer translation is 'All of your bases have been taken over by CATS'.

Jean Armour Polly, who popularised the phrase 'surfing the Internet' in 1992, worked in which job?

A librarian with a master's in library science, Polly published 'Surfing the INTERNET' in a library bulletin in June 1992. She joined the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.

NSFNET, a 1980s backbone of the early internet, was created to link researchers to what?

Supercomputers at five new centres funded from 1985 were the destination. The backbone was decommissioned on 30 April 1995, superseded by the commercial internet.

Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht went by 'Dread Pirate Roberts', a name taken from which film?

The Princess Bride supplied the pseudonym, though it is disputed whether Ulbricht was the only person to use the account. He ran the site from 2011 until his arrest in 2013.

The viral film 'Kony 2012' campaigned for the arrest of a warlord from which African country?

Uganda's Joseph Kony was the target, and the film became the first YouTube video to reach a million likes. Time magazine later called it the most viral video ever.

Amazon's first customer order, placed in April 1995, was for a study of computer thought by which author?

Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, a collection of articles on computer models of intelligence, was ordered on 3 April 1995.