In October 1969, scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles attempted to exchange data between two computers – and the paving stones of the Internet were born.

On March 12, 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, working for Europe’s physics lab CERN, proposed a decentralised system of information management, creating the World Wide Web as we know it today.

Thirty years later and we couldn’t be without the Internet. It powers everything from our computers and mobile phones through to our very homes. It has meant that we have access to a world of information from our pockets, and has opened us up to a world of technological possibilities.

To celebrate this milestone, we take a look at some facts about the web:

  1. The first ever email was sent in 1971 by US programmer Ray Tomlinson. Now, 250 billion emails are sent out daily.
  2. The world’s first website, info.cern.ch, is still online. It’s a basic HTML site containing a few lines of text.
  3. There are seven people assigned to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) who hold seven different keys. In the case of a catastrophe, these seven people can meet again and restore the state of the Internet.
  4. The first webcam was created at the University Of Cambridge to monitor the Trojan coffee pot. A live 128×128 grayscale picture of the state of the coffee pot was provided as the video feed.
  5. As of 2018, at least 4.46 billion pages exist on the internet and 1.9 billion websites.
  6. There are around 75.8 million blogs and business sites on WordPress. More than 5 million blog posts are published every single day.
  7. 95 million photos are uploaded on Instagram every day.
  8. 4 Billion out of the 7 Billion people on earth are already online.
  9. More than 85,000 websites are hacked every day. WordPress and Joomla are the most affected CMS sites on the Internet.
  10. 5,000 domain names are registered every hour.
  11. Approximately 30 percent of the world’s population is on Facebook. That’s around 2.234 billion users.
  12. The first tweet was by Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006. The tweet read ‘just setting up my twttr’. The site now has more than 335 million active users who send out 500 million tweets every single day.
  13. Garfield, the cartoon character, was offering an email service named GMail.com. Google later acquired the service, and they renamed it to Google Mail as we all know today.
  14. The first YouTube video to be uploaded was Meet At Zoo at 8:27 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2005, by Jawed Karim.
  15. 400 hours of video contents are uploaded on YouTube every minute. The site serves more than 1 Billion people every month, and an average internet user spends 4 hours every month on YouTube.
  16. Gangnam Style by PSY was the most viewed videos of all time with more than 2,840,000,000 views. It has recently been beaten by the song Despacito by Luis Fonsi which boasts an astounding 3.48 billion views and counting.
  17. There are 4.9 Million apps on Google Play and Apple App Store combined.
  18. Humans make up 49 percent of the entire traffic. Various bots and spamming software trigger the rest.
  19. The internet took four years to reach its first 50 million users. In comparison, the television took 13 years while the radio took 38 years to reach this goal.
  20. The internet requires 50 million horsepower to keep running in the current state.
  21. Approximately 9 million adults in Britain have never used the internet.
  22. The term ‘surfing’ on the internet originated in 1992, courtesy of a New York librarian whose name was Jean Armour Polly.
  23. Approximately £1.7 trillion worth of funds is spent online.
  24. The queries that you search for are just a minuscule percentage of the internet and is often referred to as the Surface Web. The remaining part is called Deep Web and it is much larger than the Surface Web. You need something known as Tor to access the Deep Web.
  25. Finland became the first country to makeInternet access a legal right in 2010.
  26. Wikipedia publishes 600 edits every 60 seconds.
  27. It is expected that around 40 billion gadgets are going to be connected to the internet by 2020.
  28. It’s estimated that about 19 percent of the world’s couples met because of the internet.
  29. China leads the world in terms of the total number of Internet users with over 630 million people. Norway, however, has the highest percentage of its population using the Internet at 95.05 percent.
  30. The first physical item ever bought and sold on the Internet was a bag of marijuana around 1971.