Oct 5, 2021 | Helpful Tips

Did You Know?

There’s no doubt that one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century was the internet. It transformed the way we conduct research, buy goods, socialize, keep up with family, and a host of other activities. It’s hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have the internet. But like everything else in life, there was a time when it wasn’t around. It had a beginning. And a gazillion (gross underestimation) things have happened to it since. Along the way, milestones were set and broken, innovations started trending, and technology blew our minds.

Here are some facts about our online world that might surprise you.

1. The current estimate of internet users is roughly 4.66 billion worldwide.

2. Google averages nearly 6 billion searches per day.

3. Email is older than you might think. The first one was sent in 1971 by inventor Ray Tomlinson. Who did he send it to? Himself, just to see if it worked.

4. In 2019 alone, over 239 billion emails were sent back and forth per day. But how much valuable information was sent? You be the judge, but over 80% of them were spam.

5. The average internet connection speed in the US is a mere 5.6 Mbps. (FYI, our slowest speed is 250 Mbps both up and down, just so ya know.)

6. The first website, called World Wide Web Project, was created in 1991 and gave us the WWW designation.

7. The very first domain ever registered was Symbolics.com. It went live on March 15, 1985, and believe it or not, is still active today.

8. Approximately 100,000 new domains are registered every single day.

9. The first webcam video was created at Cambridge University in 1991 to...wait for it...monitor a coffee pot. Really. Because geeks can’t live without caffeine, two researchers rigged up the webcam so they could keep an eye on when it was time to brew a new pot.

10. Downloading the entire internet would take approximately 11 trillion years even at fiber-optic speeds.

11. Web-based games are nothing new. The first ones started in the 1980s. But they were text-based because the internet was not yet mature enough to handle graphics.

12. YouTube uploads 72 hours (about 3 days) of videos per minute.

13. Nearly 1,000 photos are uploaded on Instagram every second.

14. 500 million tweets are sent each day.

15. How much time do we spend on social media? A lot more than you might think. Assuming a 72-year lifespan, the average person will spend over 3 million minutes on social media in their lifetime, which translates to nearly 7 years checking Facebook, Instagram, and others. And reading blogs.