So there’s this big Internet thing, and billions are using it. However, are you aware that a large percentage of these users simply use the Internet only as a product? There’ve been a real lot of misconceptions and ignorance about the Internet, but unless you’re really curious, you might throw the simply question: who cares?
The Internet is an interconnected network, and the very first thing you must learn is that there is not one source for it. No one really gives off Internet to many like a power generator emitting off sparks to houses at night. Since it is interconnected, the network, then, is essentially reliant to each other which are known as ports or addresses. Nobody creates it, but somebody maintains it, others create contents for it, and the people calls for it.
Below are a few more things that you may not know yet about the Internet. You may want to grab a marker to highlight those which you may have really missed before you open another web page.
1. The Internet is more than 40 years old.
It began back in the 1960s at MIT, but the first attempt was rather a fail. Instead of transmitting signals to encode the word ‘LOGIN,’ the first transmitted word was only ‘LOG’ right after a system crash.
However, the ‘real’ Internet was actually associated with a guy named Tim Berners-Lee. Interestingly, that Internet was actually contained in only one piece of computer.
2. Virtually absolutely everyone who has access to the Internet has a Facebook account.
According to statistics dated March 31, 2013, there’ve been more than 1.1 billion registered users for the said social network, and the reasons are but intuitively answered by anyone. That number covers a large percentile of the total number of population around the world, making it speak like, ‘who else does not have a Facebook account yet?’
3. First emoticon doesn’t have eyes
Thanks to Scott Fahlman who put the eye balls to that generic face, the original emoticon which only was composed of a dash and a closed parenthesis (-)) is not truly a face. The idea was first introduced in 1979 by Kevin Mackenzie, and so far, the development has gone too far to date by people who just wanted to express more using simple characters observable on a QWERTY keyboard.
4. A University’s Fruit
And old laboratory in University of Cambridge actually introduced the very first webcam. The initial purpose was actually to hook it up as an observatory tool for the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, which was a response for people not to keep going back and forth to measure the values. However, the videos were not really that valuable until 1993 when videos can be fully streamed ‘online.’
5. BitTorrent Masters the Bits
What gets the crown as the most responsible element to the global internet traffic? Torrents. According to a recent study, P2P (just a more technical term to torrents) traffic covers the vast majority of the internet bandwidth capacity from the North America alone, and is presumed to grow exponentially in a few years to come. Bittorrent as the most famous torrent client is claimed to be the key player to this upstream traffic, and if you are using that app, I do not necessarily mean to scare you off.
6. Dirty Collections
A study also reveals that around 80% of all the images ever shared on the Internet are pornographic materials, and that measure does not even include videos at all. If you wanted to know how dirty the Internet is as of today, then how about the fact that more than 30% of all the searches on search engines like Google refer to pornographic sites? If you are to get access to a photo of a naked woman, you can find a better resource than you can for your research project at school.
7. YouTube Sense-ation
You might wonder, but of all the hundred million videos uploaded and available on the YouTube database, does anyone—or anything—even bother to check and scan them one by one? Yes, there is. It has been estimated that there are about 100 hours of videos are being uploaded every minute in YouTube, but thanks to some highly intelligent apps and software, the admin still manages to scan 100-year-equivalent length of videos every single day. This is in line with YouTube’s commitment to ensuring intellectual property and privacy protection in accordance to the law. Now, isn’t that fast and amazing?
8. Let couples stay as one
Thanks to Internet, searching and ‘saving’ a life partner isn’t anymore that hard. We had been familiar with classified ads as a haven for looking for potential partners, and since the Internet is an overload of information and details about people, there’s no doubt that one in six marriages each day are fruits of them meeting online. If you can find the right partner for a right couple, do you even try to imagine how you can also find great disasters or enemies from the same cloud source?
9. Mails without real senders
Got that same annoying message on your spam (or inbox) folder on your e-mail client that offers instant income, immediate slimming solution, and even threats? Well, you are not alone. It has been estimated that more than 80% of all the e-mails being sent these days are spam, and though this may bring good or harm to you, they are actually machine-generated and –operated mails to facilitate communication with clients. If you decided not to be a client to this case, unfortunately, there’s not yet a real absolute solution.
10. Google is unsearched
Interestingly, of all the hundred million users of the famous search engine, only a few really knows how the name ‘Google’ is really derived. ‘Google’ is actually a ‘formal’ or ‘presentable’ way of mentioning or spelling out the word googol, which literally means a value (or a number) followed by multiple zeros. In mathematical symbols, it is simple: 1.0×10100, which signifies how excellent this search engine should be in presenting the most number of relevant results in each and every search.
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