While the dawn of the Internet began as a United States Department of Defense experiment in 1969 with Arpanet, it was not until 1990 that the modern Web started to take shape with the advent of the first web browser.
With the Internet’s rapid growth from its early beginnings to its current ubiquity, it has truly transformed the way we live, work and communicate.
While the dawn of the Internet began as a United States Department of Defense experiment in 1969 with Arpanet, it was not until 1990 that the modern Web started to take shape with the advent of the first web browser.
Created by Tim Berners-Lee, the WorldWideWeb browser, later renamed Nexus in 1994 to avoid confusion with his World Wide Web (WWW) project, was the first tool that allowed users to surf the Web using a graphical interface.
On the topic of surfing the Web, the term “surfing” in the context of browsing the Internet was first coined by librarian and author Jean Armour Polly in an article titled “Surfing The Internet”, published in 1992.
Interestingly, the analogy of “surfing” was used earlier in 1991 by the California Education and Research Federation Network (CERFnet), an early Internet service provider, in a comic book titled The Adventures Of Captain Internet And CERF Boy.
Speaking of online terminology with strange origins – ever wondered where the term “spam” came from?
These days, most associate spam with the deluge of unwanted promotional emails and messages that clog up Inboxes, not the canned meat product that is its namesake.
This association traces back to a sketch by the British comedy troupe Monty Python, first aired on TV in 1970.
The sketch featured a couple’s encounter with a cafe waitress and a menu inundated with Spam, the canned meat, which culminated in a small ship of Vikings singing a song dedicated to Spam.
Early Usenet and email users later repurposed the term to describe the marketing and advertising emails inundating their Inboxes, along with unrelated repetitive messages posted on forums.
Interestingly, this isn’t the only term from the digital age inspired by Monty Python, as the programming language Python owes its namesake to the group.
Another related tidbit is that the first bulk spam emails were sent on May 3, 1978, by marketing representative Gary Thuerk.
The emails were promoting a new computer model and were sent to 393 recipients, a far cry from the amount of spam users deal with today. Forbes reported in 2020 that 320 billion spam emails are sent every day.
Another lesser-known fact is that domain names, the unique addresses used to access websites and send emails, used to be free until the United States National Science Foundation began charging for them after 1995, according to web hosting provider InterNetX.
These days, acquiring a domain name can be a costly affair, depending on the name’s availability and popularity.
For instance, the Tesla website (tesla.com) is claimed to have cost US$11mil (RM51.3mil) and took over a decade to obtain, according to the electric vehicle maker’s owner and CEO Elon Musk.
