80 Fun Facts About Internet

What word was the operator typing when the first ARPANET message, sent from UCLA in 1969, crashed after two letters?

Charley Kline got as far as 'l' and 'o' before the SDS 940 at Stanford Research Institute went down; the full word went through about an hour later.

In which year were the first computers connected to the ARPANET, the network that grew into the Internet?

Four university sites were linked that first year, and the Network Control Program that made real applications possible arrived in 1970.

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

Utah and UC Santa Barbara were the other two of the four original nodes, but the historic first link ran up the California coast to SRI in Menlo Park.

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

Tomlinson was working at BBN on the ARPANET when he picked the @ sign, a character that conveniently never appeared in anyone's name.

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

He wanted a way for physicists at the Geneva laboratory to share documents across incompatible computers, and hypertext over the Internet was his answer.

The first website, published by Tim Berners-Lee on 20 December 1990, was about what?

It explained what the Web was and how to use it, which made it both the first website and the first user manual for the Web.

In which year was the World Wide Web's protocol and code released royalty-free?

The decision on 30 April of that year is a big reason the Web, rather than a proprietary rival, became the face of the Internet.

What was the name of the very first web browser, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990?

It ran only on NeXT computers and doubled as an editor, so it was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the Web itself.

NCSA Mosaic, the browser credited with popularising the Web in 1993, was developed at which university?

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina wrote it at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Andreessen soon left to co-found Netscape.

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

Bundling it with Windows crushed Netscape in the first browser war, and it took Firefox and later Chrome to break the near-monopoly.

Firefox was created in 2002 under which codename, a nod to rising from the ashes of Netscape?

A trademark claim from Phoenix Technologies forced a rename in 2003, and the browser went through one more name before settling on Firefox.

In which year did Google launch the Chrome browser?

It arrived in September for Windows only, built partly on Apple's WebKit engine, and within a few years it was the world's most used browser.

Google announced Chrome to journalists in 2008 with a comic book drawn by which cartoonist?

The 38-page comic reached a German blogger two days early and was scanned online, so Google moved the launch forward a day.

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?

Their landlord later joined Google herself and went on to run YouTube.

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

Andy Bechtolsheim reportedly wrote the cheque to 'Google Inc.' before the company legally existed, which forced Page and Brin to incorporate.

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

The stick figure behind the logo was an out-of-office note in case the servers crashed while Page and Brin were in the Nevada desert.

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

Sundar Pichai took over as Google's CEO in the same shake-up, while Larry Page moved up to run the parent.

Wikipedia was launched on 15 January of which year?

The date is now celebrated as Wikipedia Day; the site began as a single English edition at wikipedia.com.

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

The older project's articles were reviewed under a formal expert process, which was so slow that the open wiki quickly overtook it.

Amazon was founded on 5 July 1994 under what original name?

Bezos dropped the magic-themed name within months, partly because it sounded too much like 'cadaver' over the phone.

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

The Seattle suburb is where the famous garage was; decades later Amazon built a 43-storey tower there for 15,000 staff.

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

It went for $14.83, and the winning bidder assured founder Pierre Omidyar that he collected broken laser pointers.

Yahoo's name is often explained as a backronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchically Organized' what?

Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo say they really picked it because they liked the word's slang meaning of 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'.

Craigslist began in 1995 as what?

Craig Newmark, new to the Bay Area, was simply telling friends about local happenings; the list only became a website later.

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

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim had cashed out when eBay bought their old employer, which funded the video site.

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

The 19-second clip shows co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants.

How much did Google pay for YouTube in November 2006?

It was an all-stock deal for a company that was barely 20 months old and had yet to turn a profit.

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

It spread to other Ivy League and Boston-area colleges within weeks, then to universities across North America.

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

Facebook liked the feature so much it bought the company that pioneered it later the same year.

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.

How many characters was a tweet originally limited to?

The cap left room for a username inside a 160-character SMS; it was doubled to 280 in 2017.

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

He borrowed the idea from IRC channels, and Twitter initially told him it was 'for nerds' before adopting it.

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

Kevin Systrom named it after his taste for bourbon; the photo-sharing part was the one feature people actually used, so it became the whole app.

Roughly how much did Facebook pay to acquire Instagram in April 2012?

The app had 13 employees and no revenue at the time, which made the price look absurd; a decade later it looked like a bargain.

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

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitched a different idea to Y Combinator first; Paul Graham rejected it and nudged them toward Reddit.

Reddit's long-time tagline 'the front page of the Internet' was coined by whom?

The Y Combinator founder came up with it during the brainstorm that produced the site's concept.

Which company bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005?

A year later it overtook Google Search and Yahoo Mail as the most visited website in the US; Rupert Murdoch sold it in 2011 for about $35 million.

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

The Israeli company Mirabilis built it and sold it to AOL two years later.

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

His post suggested the sideways face as a 'joke marker' after a mock warning about a mercury spill was taken seriously.

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

In the 1970 sketch a cafe serves the tinned meat in almost every dish while Vikings drown out conversation by chanting its name.

The first documented spam, sent to 393 ARPANET users in 1978, advertised whose computers?

Marketer Gary Thuerk was reprimanded for it, but he later claimed the mass mailing sold millions of dollars' worth of machines.

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

Netscape programmer Lou Montulli borrowed the term in 1994 while building an online shopping system for MCI.

Which metal band went after Napster in 2000 after a demo of 'I Disappear' leaked?

Drummer Lars Ulrich personally delivered boxes listing more than 300,000 users the band wanted banned.

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

Harald Bluetooth united warring tribes into one kingdom, and the logo merges the runes for his initials H and B.

The name 'Wi-Fi' was coined in 1999 by which brand-consulting firm?

It was picked from a list of ten because it echoed 'Hi-Fi'; it does not stand for 'wireless fidelity', despite the persistent myth.

The first version of the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard, released in 1997, offered link speeds of up to how much?

The 802.11b amendment two years later lifted that to 11 Mbit/s and made home wireless practical.

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

The name nods to the 'luminiferous aether' once thought to carry light waves; the first version ran at 2.94 Mbit/s.

IPv4, the 32-bit Internet Protocol, provides roughly how many unique addresses?

The 32-bit space ran out in February 2011, when the last five blocks were handed to the regional registries.

How many bits long is an IPv6 address?

That gives about 340 undecillion addresses, enough to assign trillions to every person alive.

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

It belonged to a Massachusetts maker of Lisp machines; the domain was sold in 2009 and still exists.

Who created the Domain Name System in 1983 while at the University of Southern California?

Before DNS, every machine kept a single HOSTS.TXT file listing every computer on the network, which had become unworkable.

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

The two published their internetworking research in 1974 and Cerf wrote the first TCP specification the same year.

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

Working at the National Physical Laboratory, he arrived at the idea independently of Paul Baran's work at RAND in the US.

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

Robert Tappan Morris launched it from MIT to disguise its origin and became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The ILOVEYOU worm that infected tens of millions of Windows PCs in May 2000 was written in which country?

Its author, Onel de Guzman, could not be prosecuted because the country had no law against writing malware at the time.

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

Researchers wanted to know whether the pot was empty before walking down the corridor; the last machine sold on eBay for £3,350.

Archie, regarded as the first Internet search engine, was written in 1990 at which university?

Alan Emtage's tool indexed file names on FTP servers; its successors were named Veronica and Jughead, though Archie itself was not a comics reference.

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

It was named for the school's Golden Gophers mascot, and it lost out to the Web partly after the university announced licence fees.

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

Jarkko Oikarinen wrote it at the University of Oulu to replace a chat program on a local bulletin board.

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

Much of the engineering team stayed in Tallinn and Tartu even after Microsoft bought the company for $8.5 billion in 2011.

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

Mr. Peabody and Sherman used the WABAC machine in segments of the show; the web archive opened to the public in 2001.

Netflix started in 1997 as what kind of business?

Reed Hastings later said the discs were only ever a way to build a customer base for the streaming service he had in mind all along.

The dot-com bubble peaked, with the Nasdaq at its high, on 10 March of which year?

The index had risen 400% since 1995 and then lost 78% by October 2002, taking Pets.com and Webvan with it.

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

Newsgroup veterans had always dreaded September, when new students arrived; once AOL opened a gateway, September never ended.

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

Designer Masahiro Hara said the black-and-white pattern was inspired by the counters on a Go board.

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

The acronym, coined at Carnegie Mellon in 2003, spells out 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.

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

Guardian journalist Ben Hammersley tossed the word out almost as an aside in a February 2004 article.

Who coined the term 'weblog' in December 1997?

The shorter 'blog' came in 1999 when Peter Merholz jokingly split the word into 'we blog' on his own site.

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

It evolved from 'duckrolling', an earlier bait-and-switch on the same site involving a duck on wheels.

What is the maximum theoretical speed of a dial-up modem using the V.90 or V.92 protocol?

Real-world connections usually managed 40 to 50 kbit/s, and a noisy hotel phone line could drop that to 21.6.

Which media giant did AOL buy in 2001, then the largest merger in US history?

The deal is now a textbook disaster; the two were split apart again in 2009.

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 company built the ARPANET's Interface Message Processors, the network's first routers?

The 'IMP guys' were led by Frank Heart and Bob Kahn.

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

The RFC series went on to become the channel for proposing and distributing 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?

NORSAR linked via a satellite station in Sweden, and Peter Kirstein's group at University College London provided a gateway to British academic networks.

Which French research network, led by Louis Pouzin, pioneered the end-to-end 'catenet' idea in 1972?

Cerf and Kahn drew on its concepts when they published the TCP design in May 1974.

Which service became the first to offer commercial e-mail to personal computer users in 1979?

It followed up in 1980 with the first real-time chat, the CB Simulator.

Usenet began in 1979 when two students at which university used UUCP to swap news with nearby Chapel Hill?

Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis's Bourne shell scripts were publicly released in 1980.