Interesting facts about the Word Wide Web and our technological advances over the past 25+ years.

Tech Facts

DID YOU KNOW?

The World Wide Web has changed our lives.


The concept of the World Wide Web was first proposed in 1988 by software consultant Tim Berners-Lee. He was working with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, when he came up with a plan for an open computer network to keep track of research. His idea would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web. On Christmas Day 1990, he and other colleagues set up the first successful communication between a Web browser and server via the Internet. This demonstration was followed by several more years of tireless lobbying by Berners-Lee to convince professors, students, programmers and Internet enthusiasts to create more Web browsers and servers that would soon forever change the world of human communication. (published by Scientific American)

Internal communication within large corporations known as " an intranet"system began around 1994 – 1996. The idea was to increase employee productivity through a computerized access to documents and other forms of communication. E-mail, group work support, audio-video communication, texts or personal data searching all made it easier for companies to stay in touch.

The " internet" as we know it today grew out of the " intranet " concept and is now a global collection of computer networks known as the world wide web.

Affordable Web Design Ltd's founder began offering our first web design services 6 months before Google launched its search engine in 1996.

TECH FACTS

We've picked out a few of the very interesting facts concerning web improvements that have occured since 1996, bringing a lot of changes that would eventually shape the future of what we call the modern world today.

FACT 1
1996 - Affordable Web Design Ltd founder launches company's first website on January 1, 1996, offering web design services to small Canadian businesses at affordable prices. Web design styles were very basic, mostly being " scroll down " and there were very few rules governing what to incorporate into websites to attract internet searches. Although large corporations used the internet for their internal communications, it did not become popular with the general public as an everyday occurence until 1999. Affordable Web Design Ltd has been at the forefront of web development since we started over 26 years ago and we have always kept up with the constant changes in web design and development in order to offer the most effective websites to small businesses today. Our mission today is still to offer the lowest cost yet effective web services possible.



FACT 2
1996 saw the introduction of a search engine called Google, whose name stemmed from Googol, the name given to the mathematical number 10 to the power of 100, considered an incredibly large mathematical number. According to the founders of Google, their name was chosen to reflect their mission " to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.". At the time, there were a handful of search engines such as Yahoo and AOL, but searching for information was not simple. Google's new algorithm made searching a lot easier than it had been up to then.



FACT 3
1996 - Microsoft Hotmail Launch. " We are going to give you a great new way to get email. It's called 'Hotmail'. Be free from your internet service provider!" proclaimed the world's first web-based email when it launched on 4th July 1996.



FACT 4
By 1996, the 3.5" square floppy disk was in its last throes, soon to be replaced by the optical disk drive which was used for CD's, DVD's and Blu-Rays. Hard disk drives, ZIP drives, and USB flash drives eventually took over as the primary medium for storage in the market. First developed in 1976, the "floppy" was a magnetic storage disk first released with only 160 KB of disk space. The original disks were 8-inch squares, which were then replaced by 5-1/2 inch disks and then eventually by 3-1/2 inch diskettes in the 1980's.



FACT 5
By the end of 1996, there were 36 million Web users. By 1999, there were 360 million users. Currently as of 2021, the global population has reached 7.8 billion people. There are over 4.9 billion unique internet users, accounting for approximately 63% of the entire population. The average growth rate of internet users is 8.2% per year. More than 25% of websites are in English. There are still over 2.9 billion people with no internet access.



FACT 6
As of 2022, there are close to 2 billion websites online but only about 17% of all websites are active, making it about 200 million as a figure for active sites.


The Word Wide Web's technological advances have completely changed our world.