Historical Internet Firsts

Key Takeaways

You are watching Cold Houston TV. For those of you who are short on time, this video is timecoded, so you can skip to the topic you want in the description below. Hey, welcome to another episode of Cold Houston TV to go here. The internet. Something that was once created to further the chances of the United States of America surviving after a catastrophic Soviet nuclear attack has now become much larger, much more influential, and more integral in developed society than anything that has ever come before it. The internet has been around since 1978, and the public only gained access in 1991. As with everything, there's been a few key first moments that would lead to the internet as we know it today. But what were they? And what were the stories behind the individuals and moments that would become the first steps in an incredible time for human history? In this video, you'll learn something and you'll have a bit of fun along the way. We'll go through the history of the internet looking at all the key moments that changed the world. Here are 14 of them. 1971. Number 14. [Music] The first email. The very first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971. Here's a quote from him in an interview. The test messages were entirely forgettable. Most likely the first message was querty yop or something similar. The funny thing was he wrote the program for email in his own time and nobody at his company really cared about it. Ray also pioneered the use of the at sign for the email. 1990 number 13. the first website. It was late in 1990 and Tim Bernest Lee was working at CERN laboratories. He wanted to make the internet easier to use. At the time, he had to literally be an expert in computer commands just to work the internet. He wanted to link information together and let users browse at will by themselves. What he had in mind was the worldwide web. Well, it was in 1989 and the internet already existed and that you could send email, but there was no websites. So there was no HTTP, there was no HTML, there was no space of things you could click through. And it began because I was frustrated it didn't exist. I imagined a system where you could just click from one to the other. And I was so compelling that I decided that I wanted to uh build it. And on the 20th of December 1990, the first web page was put up. And you're looking at it right now. For the first time, the internet was within reach of the average person. Everybody could use it now. The first page was simply just a little bit of a guide as to what the worldwide web was and how to use it. The original page no longer exists, but a later copy from 1992 can be found at this web address. Here's a fun fact. As it turns out, the worldwide web was built on the next computer. And it was actually Steve Jobs who founded Next during his time away from Apple after being fired in 1985. So, if Steve Jobs hadn't been fired, we may not have the internet as we know it today. It's amazing how things link together when you dig through history. 1992. Number 12. [Music] What was the first picture uploaded on the web? Again, it was Tim Bernest Lee and this time it was for a bit of fun in 1992. Some of Tim's fellow employees at CERN formed a parody band in 1990. They were called the horrible cernets or the horrible cernets in English. One day Tim just asked for a few scanned photos of the girls parody group. He said it was just to publish them on some sort of information system that he had just invented called the worldwide web. They didn't really think much of it and they handed over the photos. And little did they know that it was going to become a historic moment. The very first picture on the internet. [Music] 1994. Number 11, the first search engine. Although internet search engines had been around even before the worldwide web, they were very limited in nature and usually only contained a few page titles. The first full text web search engine like the ones we have today was, have a guess, you probably haven't even heard of it. It was called webcwler and it was launched back in 1994. It wasn't until 3 and 1/2 years later when Google arrived in the scene. After this, webcwler pretty much faded into obscurity. Number 10, the very first blog. In 1994, 5 years before the term blog was even coined, Justin Hall was doing just that. Justin's web-based diary was called Justin's Links from the Underground, and it went online in 1994. It offered an early guide to the worldwide web, but drifted into personal territory over time. The New York Times magazine referred to him as the founding father of personal blogging. It wasn't until 1997 that the term web blog was coined and this was later just shortened into the word blog. 1995. Number nine, the first book purchased on Amazon. On April 3rd of 1995, John Wade Wright was working in a very early web joint venture between Apple and IBM. On this day, he was given a beta invite to a fledgling company called Amazon, and they were trying to sell books over the fledgling internet. The first book was Douglas Hoffanders, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thoughts. It sounds like such an interesting read. I think I might go out and get it right now, but maybe not. But anyway, that was a piece of history, and that was the first Amazon book ever purchased. Number eight, the first item sold on eBay. eBay was initially called Auction Web. Auction Web was founded in San Jose, California, September 3rd, 1995 by Pier Omdia. The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83 in 1995. When Puri found out that someone had actually bought his broken laser pointer online, he was quite perplexed and went on to ask the man if he actually knew that the laser pointer was broken. And the buyer's response was quite odd. He said he collected broken laser pointers. And with that, that was the very first purchase on eBay. 1996. Number seven, the first mobile phone with internet access. The first mobile phone with internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 communicator. It was launched in Finland back in 1996, but unfortunately the actual cost of accessing the internet was so high that it was actually quite unsustainable. It wasn't until 1999 that IMOD was launched in Japan. This was considered the birth of mobile phone internet services. And today, the impact of the marriage between the mobile phone and the internet has gotten so large that people say it's changing society in a negative fashion. There's no way you can blame Nokia, though. 1999. Number six, the world's first internet celebrity. Before PewDiePie, Rebecca Black, Jenna Marbles, Smosh, Chocolate Rain, the Dramatic Chipmunk, or Keyboard Cat, there was one guy who was in before it was mainstream. Mahir Kaggri from Turkey. Anyone under 20 probably would be scratching their heads. This guy was the original internet celebrity. In 1999, his website.org established him as the first person to achieve celebrity status solely through the internet. His website was full of broken English and happy snaps. By 2000, Bill Gates was said to be one of his fans. Mahira ended up in the Guinness Book of Records for the most visits to a personal homepage with an estimated 12 million hits. Some say that he was the main inspiration for the Borat movie in 2006. [Music] 2003. Number five. The first words ever said on Skype. The first words said on Skype were not in English, but in Estonian in April 2003. The words were uttered by a member of the development team. And I guess you could take a wild guess as to what they were. The English translation was, "Hello, can you hear me?" I guess that's only fitting for Skype's first words. Skype should have really just been called, "Can you hear me?" 2004. Number four. So, the first person on Facebook was actually ID number four. The first three Facebook accounts were used for testing. And you can guess who ID number four was. It was of course Mark Zuckerberg. The first non-founder to join Facebook was Ariet. Sorry if I butchered that name. He is now studying in Israel to become a rabbi. After Ari, there are 1.3 billion monthly users to follow. So he started something. 2005. Number three. The very first YouTube video. The first YouTube video was posted by Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. It was uploaded on April 23rd, 2005 and has been watched only 14 million times to date. Keep in mind at this time when they posted the video, they had no idea that YouTube would have more daily views than cable TV. 2006. Number two, the first tweet. The first tweet was written by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21st, 2006, and it simply read, "Just setting up my Twitter." We've traveled from 1971 to 2006, and many of the events we've covered have changed the way society interacts, communicates, and does business. These events were the very first moments in some of the fastest growing and largest spheres of influence ever seen by man. So, what is number one? Well, we'll take a quick break and we'll be back after this. So, this next event is number one, not because of its date or its significance, but because of its relevance to the modern internet. Number one, the world's first internet meme. It goes without saying that most traditional internet memes have had their day, and more often than not, they're just pretty annoying. But the first meme is actually quite interesting, and it really depends on how you look at it to answer this question. The very first meme could be recognized as this, a smiley face. It was posted on the 19th of September, 1982 by Scott Falman. During Scott's time at Carnegie Melon University, he noticed that there was no way of expressing human emotion during textbased forum conversations between computers. At times, jokes would often be taken the wrong way, and lengthy flame wars were common. Scott came up with the elegant solution of a smiley face. The smiley face soon caught on and quickly spread to other universities. We were being silly late at night. We were sending these things around uh messages and I proposed this thing and I thought it was just another silly message that I sent. You know, I didn't keep a copy of it. And I noticed about a week later that people were starting to use it around Carnegie Melon. A couple of weeks later that we got a message back from some colleagues on the west coast of the US uh and they were using it too now. And they were starting to make these long lists, you know, of many different uh emoticons. I only claim responsibility for the the colon minus and the parenthesis, the smiley face and the frowny face with the nose. So, some of you out there would not be satisfied with this definition of meme. So, let's look at the first meme that is recognizable as a meme in the form as we know it today. This would be the meme simply known as the dancing baby. It was first let loose on the 22nd of October 1996. The dancing baby originated as a collection of experimental testing data files as a product sample for the then groundbreaking 3D character animation software called Character Studio. It was the first truly viral meme as we know it today. It found its way into hit shows like Ali McBill, Third Rock from the Sun, and The Simpsons. And many will still recognize it immediately today. So there you go. That is literally how many of the aspects of the internet that you're used to seeing each and every day started out. If you would like to know how the internet itself started, please check out part two of the greatest story ever told on this channel. It hasn't gotten many views so far, so I'm actually thinking of remaking it and splitting it into a series in smaller chunks. Anyway, thanks for choosing to watch my video, and as usual, don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe, and I'll see you again soon for the next one. Thanks, guys. [Music] Cold fusion. It's new thinking. [Music]