4 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Internet

The internet was born about 40 years ago and in that time it has practically taken the world by storm. It has become an essential part of our daily routine and business activities, and has become so ingrained in our lives that it is, at the moment, more or less imperative to our existence. However, as important as the internet is, there are still a number of important things about the internet that are largely unknown.

The World Wide Web is not the Internet
Although many people confused the two, they are not the same. The World Wide Web is simply a part of the internet, it is not actually the Internet. While the Internet is a giant network of networks that allows computers and devices to communicate with each other, the World Wide Web exists on the Internet as a means of accessing information or data in form of websites and hyperlinks. So, while the Internet is the infrastructure or system, the World Wide Web is an application or traffic that runs on that system.

Its Inventors
While the World Wide Web is popularly known to have been invented by Tim Berners-Lee, an English Engineer and computer scientist, the Internet however first originated from the U.S. Department of Defense as workable prototype called ‘ARPANET’ (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in the late 1960s. The technology was able to grow into what we know today as the ‘Internet’ through the work of scientists Robert E. Kahn and Vinton Cerf, who developed a Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a communications model that set standards of how data could be transmitted between multiple networks. The ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet. Then, in 1990, the online world took on a more recognizable form, in other words it became popular among the public, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Its Constituents
Surprisingly, human activity actually only makes up about 49% percent of all internet traffic. The remaining 51% comes from automated programs called ‘bots’. These ‘bots’ are programs that have been built to do automated tasks on the internet and are considered as the ‘worker bees’ of the internet. The ‘bots’ help to refresh your Facebook feed, figure out how you rank on Google search results etc., and they can also impersonate humans to carry out devastating DDoS attacks (this is why you are usually asked on some websites to confirm that you’re human and not a robot, before you can proceed browsing on the site).

South Korea is Currently The Country with the Fastest Average Internet Speed
South Korea has connectivity speeds as high as 28.6 Mbps and an estimated 40 percent of the population enjoys connectivity speeds of above 25 Mbps, compared with the 12 percent of the global population.