Happy birthday, World Wide Web!
As of Tuesday, the internet is 30. Can you believe it? To mark the special occasion, we thought we'd show you some funny and quirky snippets about the birth and rise of the web.
1.) This, my friends, is the world's first YouTube video.
Very riveting!
The clip, ever-so-appropriately named "Me at the zoo," was uploaded April 23, 2005. It features Jawed Karim, one of the founders of the San Diego Zoo.
2.) On average, Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second.
That translates to more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year, worldwide. Check out more fascinating Google data from the website internetlivestats.com.
3.) The inventor of the World Wide Web, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his work, according to the BBC.
Read what Berners-Lee thinks is on the horizon in this blog he wrote for the World Wide Web Foundation, called, "30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?"
No word on how Al Gore's been recognized. (Kidding!)
I’m taking a 30-hour journey with @webfoundation to celebrate the web’s 30th birthday.
— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 12, 2019
First stop @CERN — where it all began.
We’ll be visiting London, UK today and finishing in Lagos, Nigeria tomorrow.
Follow the celebrations at #Web30 #ForTheWeb. pic.twitter.com/utQlJC8bNj
4.) This is the first-ever website, according to Buzzfeed.
And it's still online.
5.) As of Tuesday, the internet was 10,957 days old.
Check out this website, howoldistheinter.net, for a timeline and to launch a tool that'll show you how old you were when the internet first launched.
6.) The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson to himself.
He doesn't remember what it said, according to published reports.
7.) AOL spent more than $300 million to mail all those CD-ROMs back in the '90s.
You can picture exactly the ones we're talking about, right? Here, we'll include a photo below. These numbers are pretty scary.
8.) Match.com couples have created more than 1 million children, according to a Buzzfeed story from 2014.
So you have to imagine that five years later, that figure has grown even higher.
9.) The first registered domain was symbolics.com.
The site is still live. It says, in part, "Symbolics.com is owned by a small investor group in Irvine, CA. Each year several hundred thousand people visit this piece of Internet history."