If you had told the pioneers of the internet that the embryonic system that they were creating would one day support 297 billion emails every single day they would have firstly thought that electronic mail had evolved from its original format and secondly considered that you were probably a science fiction writer for coming up with such a huge number. Internet history is an interested area to explore for all tech professionals.
The cutting edge hardware that carried data across what was to become known as the internet, ran at a speed of just 56K per second, which was considered to be the super-fast highway for data before broadband changed data transfer capabilities beyond speeds previously thought possible.
The average internet access speed is now about 7.6MB, which is a mind-boggling 136 times faster today than it was then. Internet traffic is still growing and if we were to run a similar comparison another 20 years from now, the bandwidth we currently have to make do with will no doubt look just as inadequate as the speeds we had to contend with 20 years previously.
It was 1969 when a research network called Arpanet connected 4 computers together and since then, the internet has been a phenomenal growth story. Take the number of websites on the web for example, just 130 in 1993 compared to 634 million in 2012.
The internet then and now is a fascinating story and journey and rather like the universe itself, it appears to know no boundaries or limits. Check out this infographic by Whoishostingthis.com and explore the internet history.
