With today’s apps, social media, and all the other conveniences and conveniences the internet has brought us, it can be easy to take it for granted. Of course, things were not always the way they are now and, in fact, the more time passes, the more exponential the technological change is. In this regard, let’s take a moment to review how things came to be the way they are today.
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The Internet has its roots in the 1960s. In an era best known for hippie culture and music, a group of research scientists sought a way to interconnect computers to share data over long distances. The first of these networked computers was called the Advanced Projects Research Agency Network or ARPANET. The network connected computers at four American universities in 1969. The first e-mail program was developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1972, after which the Internet was used primarily to send e-mails. In the late 1970s, the Internet Protocol (IP) was developed and, in 1984, the domain name service was created, to include many that are still used today, such as.com, .org, and .edu.
Internet boom
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web using the hypertext transfer protocol to make the information-sharing potential of the Internet accessible to the public. The first “browser” show, Mosaic, came out in 1993.
The Internet population began to grow by leaps and bounds, reaching 45 million in 1996. This was up to 150 million in 1999, mostly people in the US This more than doubled in a single year to reach more than 400 million in the year 2000. For 2004, some estimates put it at around 600 million, although having reached this size it has become more difficult to make precise estimates. (Elon University School of Communications)
Changes in the last decade
Now things really got better. While it took more than a decade for the number of Internet users to reach 600 million, the following decade added a whopping 2 billion to this number, more than a third of the world’s total population. Earlier this year, We Are Social even reported a 2 million increase in just 2 weeks for social media users alone. The amount of time spent on the Internet has also skyrocketed from less than an hour a day a decade ago to an average of 4 hours a day in 2012. The number of websites soared from 3 million in 2002 to 555 million in 2012.
The way we use the Internet has changed dramatically in the last decade. Just 10 years ago, Internet Explorer absolutely dominated as the browser of choice, cornering 95% of users. Today, IE still has about a third of the share (for whatever reason), with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox very close behind. The Opera browser is also beginning to gain a foothold.
What we wrote in search engines a decade ago is also quite indicative of progress (if not so many changes) in the interests of society, compared to what we are looking for today. In 2002, the top ten search terms were, in order, Spiderman, Shakira, Winter Olympics, World Cup, Avril Lavigne, Star Wars, Eminem, American Idol, Morrowind, and Warcraft 3. In 2012, they were Rebecca Black, Google+ , Hurricane Irene, Pinterest, Ryan Dunn, iPhone 5, Casey Anthony, Adele, Osama Bin Laden and Steve Jobs. Yesterday’s main meme was Ninjas (wait what?), While more recently, it’s Forever Alone. Browser page load times have also been reduced by 62.5%.
Do you remember Friendster? Social media dominated a decade ago, with a whopping 3 million users. Today, Facebook is unbeatable with more than a billion. Other stories are more tragic. Blockbuster was worth more than $ 5 billion a decade ago, and repeatedly turned down offers to buy Netflix, which at the time was worth $ 150 million. Today, Netflix is worth more than $ 3 billion and Blockbuster is bankrupt. A decade ago, Borders had more than 1,200 stores and refused to open an online bookstore. Today they are also bankrupt. Tower Records, which had 200 stores at the time, followed the same path. (Information drawn primarily from an infographic compiled by http://www.bestedsites.com)
The future of the internet
The National Science Foundation predicts that Internet users will reach almost 5 billion by 2020. It is also safe to assume that the US will continue to have less dominance of Internet use, with more remote areas in the Middle East, Asia and Africa getting more access. .
By 2020, the world is also expected to be dominated by the “Internet of Things.” These are things that exclude PCs, tablets and smartphones, but rather devices that make up buildings, cars, etc. “smart”. It is expected to be several times the best-known Internet of personal devices, worth up to $ 8.9 trillion by 2020, made up of 212 billion connected “things.”
The Internet infrastructure itself is expected to change soon, with IPv6 about to be rolled out and a team of scientists planning a complete reinvention of the Internet infrastructure from scratch around the world.
These are just a few of the things we can expect to see in the years to come. However, in real terms, who really knows what the Internet will be like in another decade?
