The internet first began in the 1960s in its most basic form and ideas. It was first proposed by J. C. R. Licklider. Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore did not invent the internet. The World Wide Web, which is the more famous part of the internet, came out in 1989.

By 2005, 51 percent of first-world families were on the internet; now it is 93 percent. In 2005 worldwide it was 16 percent, now it is 67 percent.

The official birthday of the internet is January 1, 1983, when ARPANET formally switched to TCP/IP from an older NCP protocol.

The term internet was coined in 1974 in a document calling it the Internet Transmission Control Program.

Gary Thuerk sent the first spam email in 1978 to 393 people on ARPANET. A Monty Python sketch inspired the name for spam.

There was a famous webcam that was used to check a coffee pot and ran from 1993 to 2001. Its resolution was very poor at 128×128 and updated 3 times per minute.

The first official webcomic on the internet was Doctor Fun in 1993.

Symbolics.com was the first domain name, registered in 1985.

The GIF image format was created by Steven Wilhite in 1987, and he insists it is pronounced “Jiff,” though most of the internet community disagrees with him.

People were offered commercial internet options in the late 1980s, with one service being called The World.

Ray Tomlinson invented email and using the @ symbol in 1971 in order to separate the user from the machine.

Before graphical web browsers, text-based browsers such as Archie, Gopher, and Veronica were popular options.

One of the reasons website counters were publicly posted is that user traffic was typically small, and web creators wanted to know people were reading their work.

Before broadband and other fast internet options, dial-up was extremely common, and speeds were so slow that even a large number of images, let alone video, had to be downloaded for at least an hour, sometimes even the whole night. And hopefully the connection would not be lost, along with all your progress.

A lot of Gen Xers first accessed the internet not at home, but through their schools and universities.

Mosaic may have been the biggest web browser of 1993 until it was completely outclassed by Netscape Navigator in 1994.

Seventy percent of the world uses a smartphone to scroll the internet, though 220 million phones worldwide are not used for the World Wide Web.

The average daily time spent online for people is over 6 hours.

China has the most internet users with over one billion, and India is second with 900 million.

AOL dial-up internet shuts down as of September 30, 2025.