When the internet was made royalty free and available for use by the general public, no one could even begin to imagine how vast and intricate it would become and how much, as a nation, we would depend on it. Take a look at the first ever website here.
In 20 years it’s hard to imagine how far the internet has developed. Not only is it something that dominates our working life, finding out information and access to emails, but it is also something that we rely on in our own time.
Many of us use Google as a spell-checker, Facebook to keep up to date with our friends and Twitter as a news source. It’s amazing to see these advances in technology and how we adapt to them, and it really does make us wonder what may be in store for the next 20 years!
Timeline:
1989 – Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet and made the first ever website
1993 – The internet was made available for everyone to use for free
1994 – 10,000 www sites. First pizza available to order online in the U.S.
1998 – Google is launched!
1999 – Wi-Fi is standardised
2001 – Wikipedia is launched
2003 – Skype is released to the public and MySpace becomes the most popular social network
2004 – Web 2.0. “The Facebook” is launched for college students
2005 – Youtube is launched
2006 – Twitter is launched
2007 – The iPhone was almost wholly responsible for mobile web technologies and apps
2009 – Google is the most popular website
2012 – 144 billion emails are sent per year. It is estimated that there will be 1 billion websites by 2013 and 2 billion in 2015
2013 – 1 in 8 married couples in the U.S meet online