AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE INTERNET

• Google got its name from the mathematical figure googol, which denotes the number 'one followed by a hundred zeros'!
• Yahoo! derived its name from the word Yahoo coined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels. A Yahoo is a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human!
• Researchers consider that the first search engine was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
• Marc Andreessen founded Netscape. In 1993, he had already developed Mosaic, the first web browser with a GUI.
• Lurking is to read through mailing lists or news groups and get a feel of the topic before posting one's own messages.
• An anonymiser is a privacy service that allows a user to visit websites without allowing anyone to gather information about which sites they visit.
• 'Carnivore' is the Internet surveillance system developed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who developed it to monitor the electronic transmissions of criminal suspects.
• The original URL of Yahoo! was http://akebono.stanford.edu/?
• The Electrohippies Collective is an international group of 'hacktivists' based in Oxfordshire, England.
• Did you know that Domain registration was free until an announcement by the National Science Foundation on 14th September, 1995!
• The Internet was initially called the 'Galactic Network' in memos written by J.C.R Licklider from MIT in 1962.
• Shokyu Ishiko, a doctorate in agriculture and chief priest of Daioh Temple in Kyoto has created an online virtual temple which will perform memorial services for lost information!
• Telnet is one of the oldest forms of Internet connections. Today, it is used primarily to access online databases.
• The morning after Internet Explorer 4 was released, certain mischievous Microsoft workers left a 10 by 12 foot letter 'e' and a balloon with the message, "We love you", on Netscape front lawn!
• If you were a resident of Tongo, a monarchy in the southwest Pacific, you could own domains as cool as 'mail.to' and 'head.to'!
• The first Internet worm was created by Robert T.Morris Jr and attacked more than 6000 Internet hosts!
• Domain names can be sold at really high prices! The most expensive domain name was 'business.com', which was bought by eCompanies for $7.5 million in 1999!
• The first ever ISP was CompuServe. It still exists, under AOL Time Warner.
• Ray Tomlinson, a scientist from Cambrige, introduced electronic mail in 1972. He used the @ to distinguish between the sender's name and the network name in the e-mail address.
• It took 13 years for television to reach 50 million users; It took the Internet less than 4 years!
• As of now, there are over 260 million people with Internet access worldwide!
• The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute!

Published By-
Tanya Kakar
CSE, IInd yr