Internet history, fact by fact

The first set of emoji was just 176 tiny 12×12 pixel images, designed in Japan in 1999.

The oldest webpage is still online — a plain page explaining what this new 'World Wide Web' thing was.

The web cookie was invented in 1994 to fix a simple problem: websites couldn't remember you between clicks.

'Wi-Fi' doesn't actually stand for anything — it was invented as a catchy name that sounded like hi-fi.

The floppy-disk 'save' icon survives in apps used by people who have never touched an actual floppy disk.

The name 'Google' is a play on 'googol' — a 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

The first web browser to show images inline, Mosaic, helped turn the web from text into something everyone wanted.

AOL once mailed out so many free trial CDs that they briefly made up a huge share of all CDs on Earth.

That screeching dial-up sound was two modems introducing themselves and agreeing on how to talk.

The first computer worm, 'Creeper', politely announced itself: 'I'm the creeper, catch me if you can.'

The program built to hunt down Creeper was called 'Reaper' — arguably the world's first antivirus.

Comic Sans was designed in 1994 for a cartoon dog that helped people use a computer.

The domain voice.com sold for a reported $30 million in 2019, one of the priciest public domain deals ever.

Yahoo reportedly had the chance to buy Google for around a million dollars in the late 1990s. They passed.

The QWERTY keyboard on your phone is a layout designed for mechanical typewriters in the 1870s.

The most-liked photo on Instagram was, for a long time, a plain stock picture of an egg.

Before search engines took over, much of the web was found through directories curated by actual humans.

The word 'blog' is just a squished version of 'weblog'.

'Meme' was coined by a biologist in 1976 to describe ideas that spread — long before the internet ran with it.

The first text message ever sent, in 1992, simply said 'Merry Christmas'.

IRC, launched in 1988, let strangers around the world chat in real time decades before group chats were normal.

ICQ's 'uh-oh!' message alert is burned into the memory of anyone who was online around the year 2000.

Hotmail launched on the 4th of July, 1996 — the date was chosen to symbolize freedom from your ISP's email.

The blink tag, which made text flash on and off, is remembered as one of the web's most despised features.

The Wayback Machine has quietly archived hundreds of billions of web pages since 1996.

In the dial-up era, downloading a single song could take the better part of an afternoon.

The 'hamburger' menu — three stacked lines — actually dates back to interface designs from the early 1980s.

The phrase 'surfing the internet' was popularized by a librarian in 1992.

CAPTCHAs exist to prove you're human — and quietly trained AI by making you label images for years.

The 'like' button as a universal gesture of approval was popularized by Facebook in 2009.

IBM's Simon, from 1994, is often called the first smartphone — it had a touchscreen and could send faxes.

During the dot-com boom, companies added '.com' to their names and watched their stock prices soar overnight.

The recycle bin on your desktop is a metaphor so good most people forget it's a metaphor at all.

Skype, launched in 2003, let people call across the planet for free and made 'video calling grandma' normal.

The @ symbol had no common English name for centuries — other languages nicknamed it 'snail', 'monkey tail', or 'little dog'.

Match.com launched in April 1995, founded by Gary Kremen, and became the site that actually turned online dating into a mainstream idea.

Prodigy launched in 1984 as one of the first commercial online services in the US, years before most people had ever heard of AOL.

AOL Instant Messenger's classic door-opening and door-closing sound effects told users the exact moment a friend signed on or off.

MSN Messenger launched in 1999, becoming Microsoft's answer to AIM and a staple of after-school chatting for millions of teenagers.

Yahoo Messenger launched in 1998, complete with its own cast of animated emoticons that could take over half the chat window.

BitTorrent, created by programmer Bram Cohen in 2001, broke files into pieces shared between users instead of pulling everything from one server.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by two former Yahoo employees who initially just wanted an app to show friends' phone statuses.

Tumblr launched in 2007, built by teenage founder David Karp around fast, easy reblogging rather than long, effortful posts.

WordPress launched in 2003 and eventually grew to power a huge share of the entire web.

Blogger launched in 1999 from a small company called Pyra Labs, and was bought by Google in 2003.

Xanga launched in 1999, blending blogging with social profile features that made it hugely popular with teenagers in the early 2000s.

Free homepage builders like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod let millions of people build a personal website in the 1990s with zero coding experience.

4chan launched in 2003 as an anonymous imageboard and became an unlikely incubator for internet meme culture.

Digg launched in 2004, letting users vote — or 'digg' — stories up to the site's front page.

del.icio.us launched in 2003 as one of the first social bookmarking sites, and helped popularize the word 'tag' for organizing content online.

Something Awful, founded in 1999, became an unlikely birthplace for internet jokes and slang that spread across the wider web for years afterward.

Fark.com launched in 1999 as one of the earliest sites built entirely around users submitting and discussing links.

The viral 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' meme spread in 2000 and 2001, taken from the clumsy English translation of an older Japanese video game.

Rickrolling — tricking someone into clicking a link that plays an unexpected music video — became a widespread internet prank around 2007.

The 'lolcats' craze, captioned photos of cats in broken English, exploded after a site called I Can Has Cheezburger launched in 2007.

The Numa Numa video, a young man lip-syncing enthusiastically at his webcam, went viral in late 2004 and became one of the first big viral video stars.

Nyan Cat, a looping animation of a Pop-Tart cat flying through space, went viral in 2011 and stayed a meme staple for years afterward.

The 'Double Rainbow' video, a man's overwhelmed reaction to a rainbow, went viral in 2010 and became shorthand for internet-scale overreaction.

Long before smartphones, teenagers coordinated entire friendships around a single shared family phone line and an instant messenger buddy list.

Early online forums let people with rare medical conditions find each other for the first time, sometimes forming the only support network they'd ever had.

Chain emails, forwarded again and again with a growing list of names in the header, were one of the first ways ordinary people experienced something 'going viral.'

BBS system operators, or 'SysOps,' often ran their boards as an unpaid hobby out of a bedroom, sometimes racking up steep personal phone bills to keep them online.

Before broadband, many households had exactly one phone line, which meant going online meant nobody could call the house — a common source of family arguments.

Early telecommuters in the 1980s used acoustic couplers — cradles a phone handset fit into — to connect home computers to office mainframes.

Online classroom pen-pal programs like ePALS, launched in 1996, let students exchange messages with kids in other countries as part of schoolwork.

Early text-based virtual worlds called MUDs, the first of which appeared in 1978, let strangers explore fantasy worlds together using nothing but typed commands.

Web rings — chains of small, related personal websites linking to each other — helped people find niche communities before search engines got good at it.

Guestbooks, a simple form at the bottom of a personal homepage, let total strangers leave a note proving they had visited your corner of the web.

Online multiplayer gaming clans in the late 1990s and 2000s often functioned like real social clubs, with their own rosters, rivalries, and inside jokes.

LAN parties — hauling a full desktop computer to a friend's house to play games over a local network — were a defining ritual of gaming culture before fast home broadband made it unnecessary.

EverQuest, released in 1999, was nicknamed 'EverCrack' by players joking about how hard it was to stop playing.

World of Warcraft, released in 2004, reportedly had more subscribers at its peak than some countries have citizens.

RuneScape, launched in 2001, was one of the first massively multiplayer games playable directly in a web browser, no download required.

Neopets, launched in 1999, taught a generation of kids the basics of an in-game economy by having them feed, dress, and trade virtual pets.

Habbo Hotel, launched in 2000, was a pixel-art virtual hotel where teenagers around the world hung out, chatted, and decorated their own rooms.

Second Life, launched in 2003, let users build and sell virtual goods and land — and some players made real money doing it.

Early online daters in the 1990s got the same safety advice people still give today — meet in public, tell a friend where you're going — just without an app to do it through.

Long-distance couples in the early 2000s relied on AIM and ICQ status messages as their main lifeline between visits, long before video calls were easy.

Online dating carried enough of a stigma in the 1990s that many early users kept it a secret from friends and family.

By the 2010s, meeting a partner online had gone from a last resort to one of the most common ways couples actually met.

Some of the earliest online daters exaggerated so predictably that pretending to be someone else entirely eventually earned its own name: catfishing.

Forum signature images, tiny animated banners users attached to every post, were both a status symbol and a bandwidth headache on slow connections.

LiveJournal let users tag every post with a 'mood,' from ordinary feelings like 'happy' to deeply specific inside jokes only their friends would understand.

Personal blogs in the early 2000s functioned like public diaries, and some bloggers built such loyal followings that leaving a comment felt like joining a small community.

Doctor Fun, one of the earliest daily webcomics, began appearing online in 1993, before most people had ever seen art distributed this way.

Early online multiplayer chess and card game servers in the 1990s let strangers play against each other for the first time without ever meeting.

The rise of webmail in the late 1990s meant people could check their inbox from any library or internet café, not just their home computer.

Internet cafés became a common way for people without home computers to get online through the late 1990s and 2000s, charging by the hour.

Early instant messenger 'nudge' and 'buzz' features let you literally shake a friend's chat window to get their attention.

Group chat culture before smartphones mostly happened in AIM chat rooms and IRC channels, organized loosely around a shared interest rather than a shared friend group.

Texting overtook phone calls as many people's most common way to reach friends sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, a shift that surprised carriers who had built their business around voice minutes.

Early SMS messages were capped at 160 characters, a limit inherited from older telegraph and paging protocols rather than any deliberate design choice.

Texting culture developed its own grammar — dropped capital letters, minimal punctuation — that linguists have studied as a genuine, evolving form of writing.

Predictive texting on early phones led to its own genre of mistakes, since a single wrong keypress could turn an innocent word into something else entirely.

PayPal, founded in 1998, started by letting people beam money to each other's handheld PalmPilots before pivoting fully to the web.

LinkedIn, launched in 2003, was one of the first big social networks built specifically around professional identity rather than friendship.

Google Talk launched in 2005, offering a stripped-down, ad-free alternative to the era's cluttered instant messengers.

Skype's earliest video calls in the mid-2000s let grandparents actually see their grandchildren over long distances for the first time, not just hear their voices.

Early internet users often paid for access by the hour, watching the clock while they browsed to avoid a shockingly high phone bill.

Some families installed a second phone line specifically so someone could be online without blocking incoming calls.

AOL's cheerful 'You've Got Mail' announcement belonged to a real person, staffer Elwood Edwards, who recorded it for a flat one-time fee with no idea it would become one of the most recognized voices of the 1990s.

Early web directories, curated entirely by human editors, tried to catalog the 'whole' internet by hand before it grew far too large for that to be possible.

Early message board 'flame wars' could stretch across hundreds of replies, with entire threads dedicated to nothing but two users arguing.

Usenet, one of the internet's earliest discussion systems, organized conversation into thousands of topic-specific newsgroups years before web forums existed.

Early online role-players developed entire etiquette systems for text-based combat and storytelling, long before graphical games could render any of it visually.

The first banner ad, for AT&T on the site HotWired in 1994, asked a simple question: 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.'

Amazon's very first sale, in 1995, was a computer science textbook — a fitting start for a company that began by selling only books.

eBay was originally launched under the name AuctionWeb, just one small section of founder Pierre Omidyar's personal website.

Online multiplayer game clans often had formal 'recruitment' processes, complete with tryouts, that mimicked real sports teams.

Some of the earliest viral 'challenge' trends moved by email attachment, passed from friend to friend at a fraction of the speed later social platforms would make normal.

The earliest widely used online avatars weren't photos at all — pixelated cartoon icons stood in for millions of AIM and forum users who never showed their real face online.

Early internet slang terms like 'noob' and 'pwned' grew out of gaming culture before spreading into everyday chat.

Star Trek fan fiction existed in printed fanzines years before the internet, but moving online in the 1990s let fans across the world collaborate and share instantly for the first time.

Fan-built wikis, written entirely by volunteers, now document some fictional universes in more detail than any official reference book ever attempted.

Online fan communities popularized 'headcanon' — a personal interpretation of a story that was never officially confirmed but felt true to fans anyway.

Wattpad, launched in 2006, let amateur writers publish serialized fiction chapter by chapter and build an audience without ever going through a publisher.

Early online gaming guilds in games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft required careful scheduling across time zones just to get enough members online for a single raid.

The earliest multiplayer video game sessions were often two people quite literally in the same room, taking turns at one keyboard before real networking caught on.

Early competitive gaming events were sometimes held in convention-center hallways with players bringing their own monitors, long before dedicated esports arenas existed.

CU-SeeMe, developed at Cornell University in 1992, let ordinary internet users make video calls years before broadband made video chat effortless.

Early internet chess servers in the 1990s let amateur players study games against opponents ranked far beyond anyone they could find locally.

Some of the earliest viral internet stars, like the Star Wars Kid, never intended for their private video to be seen by anyone outside a small circle of friends.

IRC channels in the 1990s often had their own elected or informal moderators, called 'ops,' who could mute or remove disruptive users in real time.

Online multiplayer strategy games in South Korea's PC bang internet cafés helped turn casual gaming into a genuine spectator sport by the early 2000s.

Early bloggers frequently linked to and argued with each other's posts, forming loose, sprawling conversations that stretched across dozens of separate websites at once.

Instant messenger status messages — 'away,' 'busy,' 'invisible' — gave millions of people their first taste of broadcasting a mood to an entire friend group at once.

Some early online friendships, formed entirely through a shared hobby forum, lasted for decades even though the two people never learned each other's real names.

Dial-up users developed an entire personal ritual around getting online: waiting through the connection screech, then racing to check email before someone else picked up the phone.

Online multiplayer trivia and quiz shows in the 2000s let strangers compete against each other in real time, years before mobile trivia apps existed.

Early podcasts in the mid-2000s were distributed as plain downloadable audio files, often stitched together by hobbyists with no formal broadcasting experience.

Online multiplayer racing and sports games in the early 2000s let friends compete against each other over a modem, with noticeable lag that became its own inside joke.

Early message-board 'lurkers' — people who read every post but never wrote one — vastly outnumbered the small group of users who actually posted.

Amazon's original 1995 logo showed a curved line under the name meant to suggest a smile, an idea the company kept for decades afterward.

Early adopters of online banking in the 1990s often had to mail in a signed paper form just to get the account activated in the first place.