Top 10 Internet Firsts That Changed Everything
10.
First Picture
The very first picture ever uploaded to the World Wide Web was a picture of the all-girl
comedy group Les Horrible Cernettes.
The group was made up of administrative assistants and partners of researchers at The European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Silvano de Gennaro, the group’s manager, took the picture backstage at a music festival
that was hosted annually by CERN.
He Photoshopped it and saved it as a .gif file.
How this particular picture, instead of something artistic or science-based, came to be the
first ever picture uploaded to the Web stemmed from the fact that de Gennaro worked at CERN
near Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
When it came time to choose a picture to upload, Berners-Lee used the picture of the band because
he wanted to show the heads at CERN that rather than just being a way for scientists to communicate,
the Internet could also be fun.
He uploaded the picture on July 18, 1992, forever immortalizing a badly photoshopped
picture of a comedy band that sang jokes about science.
9.
First Email
Email got its start in the early 1960s, when researchers would leave messages in a mailbox
for their colleagues, who could only access the notes on the same terminal.
Computer-to-computer email got its start in 1968, when Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) was
hired by the United States Defense Department to work on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
A BNN employee named Ray Tomlinson started working on an experimental file transfer protocol
called CYPNET and noticed that it could be used in conjunction with SNDMSG, the program
designed to leave electronic messages.
In doing so, he discovered he could send a message from one computer to another.
Tomlinson realized that in order to do this, he needed to have an identifier that basically
equated to a mailing address.
That’s when he came up with one of the most innovative, yet simple ideas of the 20th century:
he chose the “@” symbol to connect the user and network, simply because it made the
most sense to him.
It would include the user’s name and the host where it should be sent.
In July of 1971 Tomlinson sent the first email to the computer next to his, which read, “QWERTYIOP”.
After figuring out how to send messages from computer to computer, the idea flourished
into the staple of everyday life that we know now.
8.
First YouTube Video
The world’s third most popular website got its start in early 2005 when it was created
by PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
The popular story, which Karim now disputes, is that Hurley and Chen were at a dinner party
and were struggling to show videos, and those difficulties planted the seed that grew into
YouTube.
They first registered the domain on February 14, 2005, and worked on YouTube out of a garage
for a few months.
On April 23, 2005, at 8:27 p.m. they posted the first video called Me at the zoo.
The 19-second video features Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo,
talking about his interest in “really, really, really long trunks.”
Since its launch, YouTube has become the dominant video streaming site and is synonymous with
online videos.
Only Facebook and Google are more popular websites, with YouTube receiving three billion
visitors every day.
7.
First Domain Name
Symbolics Inc. registered the first domain name, Symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985.
Symbolics Inc. grew out of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab, and was the first company
to make workstation computers.
They were actually so far ahead of the game that “workstation computer” wasn’t even
a term at that point.
The company went bankrupt in the late 1980s, but the owner of the domain kept paying the
dues on the website until August of 2009, when it was sold to XF.com Investments for
an undisclosed price.
The website is now a museum of sorts, where you can visit and learn random facts about
the Internet.
6.
First Website
While Symbolics was the first domain registered, it wasn’t the first website.
After all, the internet and the World Wide Web are actually two different things.
In the simplest terms, the Internet is what you connect to and the Web is how you view
it.
You may remember CERN from the Les Horrible Cernettes photo or maybe the Large Hadron
Collider, but they also launched very first website on August 6, 1991.
It was a simple page, similar to a Word document with black lettering on a white background
with blue hyperlinks.
It briefly described project W3, better known now as the World Wide Web.
On April 30, 2013 – the 20th anniversary of the announcement of the World Wide Web
– CERN announced they would re-launch the website.
They found a copy that dated back to 1992, with the hopes of digging even deeper into
the archives for the earliest possible version.
5.
First Live Music Stream
A major difference between the advent of the World Wide Web and other mediums like the
radio and television is that the Web didn’t rely on live feeds of sound or video.
Instead, the Web was essentially an update of the printing press.
At first it was just text, and as technology became more sophisticated the possibility
for live video arose in 1993.
So what music superstar of 1993 played the first online concert?
Bjork?
Counting Crows?
Celine Dion?
Actually, it was a little-known band called Severe Tire Damage, who played live on the
Internet for the first time on June 24, 1993.
STD was a rock band made up of computer technologists from Digital Equipment Corp., Xerox, Apple,
and Sun, giving them inside knowledge of a technology called Multicast Backbone (M-bone).
M-bone utilized voice and video and was used by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
At the time, not many people saw the concert and they may not have received any recognition
for their breakthrough, had it not been for The Rolling Stones.
On November 22, 1994, the Stones were going to stream 20 minutes from their concert in
Dallas utilizing M-bone, and the record label was promoting it as the first rock band in
cyberspace.
Already well versed in M-bone, STD jumped on the same stream and played before and after
the Rolling Stones, a move that garnered them recognition as the first band to play live
online.
4.
First Item Sold on eBay
The “story” of eBay has become legendary, with its creation supposedly stemming from
a programmer named Pierre Omidyar wanting to give his wife a platform to trade her Pez
dispensers.
Naturally, the legend is more interesting than the actual story.
In 1995, Omidyar was thinking that the web might make for a great marketplace, specifically
utilizing an auction format for fair pricing on items.
He launched the website AuctionWeb on September 3, 1995.
The first item to sell was a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83.
Confused by someone paying for that much for a defective item, Omidyar discovered the buyer
collected broken laser pointers.
Where Pez comes into the story is that, at the time Omidyar launched AuctionWeb, his
future wife was big into Pez and traded a lot on AuctionWeb.
Omidyar thought it was interesting that collectors were so passionate about ordinary items, obviously
not realizing he was about to create a billion dollar empire on that very notion.
3.
First Book Sold on Amazon
Amazon.com got its start in 1995 when founder Jeff Bezos left his position as a vice president
of a Wall Street firm.
He moved to Seattle and began working on his website, which he originally called Cadabra.
Bezos eventually changed it to Amazon in part because Cadabra sounded too much like cadaver,
but more importantly because it started with an A, meaning it would be high up on lists
ordered alphabetically.
Amazon originally launched as an online book retailer, and the first book sold in July
of 1995 was Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms
Of Thought, by Douglas Hofstadter.
A computer scientist named John Wainwright purchased the book, and to thank him for his
business, Amazon named a building on their campus after him.
Man, all they ever do for us is offer lousy recommendations on bad movies.
2.
First Downloadable Music
It’s hard to say definitively what the first song on the Internet was, since no one really
knew what relationship the web would have with music in the early 1990s.
However, it’s widely believed that the first people to put a song online were two guys
named Jeff Patterson and Rob Lord.
Sometime in early 1993, they uploaded some .MP2 audio files by a punk band that Lord
played in called The Ugly Mugs to a file transfer protocol (FTP) portal.
The Ugly Mugs mostly played in Santa Cruz, but wanted to find a wider audience.
Soon after getting their own music online, they started uploading other local bands,
effectively creating the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA).
Eventually, they had over 25,000 bands and artists, and over 680,000 songs.
The first Internet single released by a major label happened a little later in 1993, when
Geffen Records released the single “Head First” by Aerosmith on the Internet in .WAV
format.
1.
First Banner Ad
They may be the bane of your online existence, but banner ads are essential in keeping the
Internet humming along, providing revenue streams for all of those free websites you
scramble to delete from your browser history.
The origin of this basic staple of the Internet and e-commerce dates back to October 27, 1994.
Joe McCambley, who ran a small digital advertising company, created the first banner ad for AT&T.
The all-text ad – which said “Have you ever clicked your mouse here?”
– appeared on Hotwired.com, the first digital magazine.
When the user clicked on it, the link took them to a site where they could do a virtual
tour of seven of the world’s top museums.
The idea was to show that AT&T could take you anywhere on the Internet.
It’s hard to believe now, but people actually loved it.
Amazingly, 44 percent of Hotwired’s visitors clicked the ad, and some even shared it with
friends.
Compare that to today, when only about 0.0004 percent of website visitors click on banner
ads, and sending one to your friends is a good way to lose those friends.
McCambley believes his ad was successful because it was part of a marketing strategy, it was
fun, and it wasn’t made with bad intentions.
Unlike those “discreet encounters” today’s banner ads keep urging you
to explore.