From humble beginnings to global dominance, the internet has transformed our world in just a few decades. Join us as we explore the pivotal milestones that shaped our digital landscape! Our countdown includes groundbreaking innovations, revolutionary platforms, and technological turning points that forever changed how we connect, communicate, and consume information.
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00:00On the one hand, we have team black and blue. On the other, team white and gold.
00:04Welcome to WatchMojo, and today, we're counting down our picks for those monumental milestones
00:10within the history of the World Wide Web.
00:12It spans the globe like a superhighway. It is called Internet.
00:17Number 10. The First Tweet. It wasn't called Twitter back then.
00:21Well, it's technically not called Twitter now, but we all know that nobody calls it X.
00:25Anyways, the first actual tweet was from its creator, Jack Dorsey,
00:30and it occurred back when the social media platform was simply known as Twitter, without the vowels.
00:35This is the very first tweet ever posted on Twitter, all the way back in 2006.
00:40The very simple statement of Dorsey setting up his account basically set the stage for an entire generation of hot takes,
00:47misinformed opinions, and indefensible positions.
00:50Listen, church, if you gon' tweet for Sextina Aquafina, you need to capture the essence of my personal brand, okay?
00:57All upper caps, little punctuation, lots of crutched bullsh** about the Illuminati.
01:01In other words, it made the Internet an even more level playing field for just about everyone to have a voice.
01:08Whether or not that's a good or bad thing, however, is up for debate.
01:12What advice would you offer to other people who want to create an app or want to get involved in technology and start their own business?
01:18Well, first, never feel like you've made it.
01:20Number nine, spamming is born.
01:23One could actually call it e-marketing.
01:26Gary Turk certainly did back in 1978 when he made history by sending out the first unsolicited electronic message.
01:34What you're seeing on your screen now is a piece of sales history.
01:37This was the first ever cold, unsolicited email sent by a salesperson.
01:42Turk sent out his spam slash e-marketing to those few who had ARPANET addresses.
01:48More on that later.
01:49Those recipients, predictably, weren't too thrilled on the other end of that line.
01:54Hi, how are you?
01:55All low prices on erectile dysfunction, remedies, sleeping pills, old person drugs.
01:59This included representatives for ARPANET, who admonished Turk on his actions.
02:05It was only a couple days later before they all started complaining.
02:07That said, the spam blast was successful, since the company for which Turk was working saw a massive increase in sales for their line of VAX computing systems.
02:18Spam, spam, spam, agent, spam.
02:20Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.
02:25Number eight, Wikipedia goes live.
02:27It's sometimes easy to forget how Wikipedia's publicly edited status essentially means that it shouldn't be taken as gospel.
02:34I don't even know how that rumor got started.
02:36Rumor? Rumor?
02:38It's true.
02:40It's on the Wikipedia.
02:41Yet, the site has become a de facto source for many of us to cultivate our daily doses of Digi-knows.
02:48Granted, Wikipedia's many monitors and curators ensure that the site's endless resources of knowledge try to retain at least a semblance of impartiality.
02:58Do your colleagues at work know what you do?
03:00Oh, yes.
03:01What do they think of it?
03:03Um, probably that I'm nuts.
03:06Why?
03:07Because I edit Wikipedia all the damn time.
03:12It was back on January 15th, 2001 that Wikipedia went live.
03:17And today, its consistent flow of updated information provides rabbit hole after rabbit hole for us to spelunk.
03:23I'm still going to research.
03:25Yeah, sure, yeah, research.
03:26Okay.
03:26Yeah, Wikipedia.
03:28Number seven, Amazon is launched.
03:30Hey, are you old enough to remember a time when all of our desired purchases weren't waiting right at our fingertips?
03:36Oh, Rory, come on.
03:39Did you order from Amazon again?
03:40Amazon officially launched back in July of 1995 and initially specialized in books.
03:46The company debuted officially in 1995 and the very first book sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, colon,
03:53Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
03:57Fast forward to the modern day, and Jeff Bezos' company has become the behemoth that ate the juggernaut in terms of e-commerce.
04:04For better or worse, Amazon has changed how brick-and-mortar stores operate, while forever altering the customer experience.
04:11It's now a place where people from all walks of life shop, listen, watch, and yes, read, while at the same time doing all of this with instant gratification.
04:22Listen, I need your help.
04:24Can you explain to me now in detail how to use Amazon.com?
04:29YouTube wasn't the first to pioneer online video, but it was probably the first to perfect it.
04:37Alright, so here we are, in front of the elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long fronts, and that's cool.
04:50Like Wikipedia in the information space, YouTube has become the default for many of us to stream videos.
04:56For just about anything, really.
04:57I don't care about the prime directive, we gotta go and walk back tonight.
05:04Sure, other competitors to YouTube still exist, such as Dailymotion, but this video-sharing site has grown far beyond simple travelogue or humor clips.
05:14It's instead become a place where many of us earn a living, writing, editing, and producing video content for audiences that have come along with us for the ride.
05:22I would love to know in the comments.
05:24If you aren't already, please go ahead and subscribe and hit that notification bell so that we do upload new videos.
05:30You can be the first to know.
05:31YouTube is also an ever-changing internet beast, with fluid standards and rules that make uploading a true adventure.
05:40Number 5.
05:41Free music.
05:43Sort of.
05:44Contrary to popular opinion, Napster didn't destroy the music industry, just like home taping didn't kill music back in the 1980s.
05:51So, uh, how many MP3s do you have on your computer?
05:54About 600.
05:55Maybe like 100 or something.
05:57Uh, 6 or 7,000.
05:59Instead, the concept of sharing music peer-to-peer for free forced the record companies to shift how they delivered music to the masses.
06:07We were trying to negotiate with the labels.
06:10We were trying to fight the court case.
06:12And we were trying to keep the system working all at the same time.
06:15There will always be those that prefer keeping their lives clutter-free by keeping their music in the cloud.
06:20At the same time, however, the thriving sales of vinyl and uptick in tape and CD nostalgia have worked in tandem with the world file-sharing created back in 1999.
06:31It's free and it's easy and, you know, it's wrong, yeah, but a lot of people do it.
06:36Pretty much everybody does.
06:37What was most interesting about the Napster era was primarily the wild west of lawless blog spots sharing rapid share and mega upload links until the cows came home.
06:53Number 4.
06:55That's Hot Mail.
06:56It was the best of times.
06:58It was the worst of times.
06:59We mean that era when Hot Mail debuted its free email service to the public, albeit with a ridiculously low amount of storage.
07:08Is our email up and running?
07:09No, no, no.
07:10This is my Hot Mail.
07:11Then again, it wasn't as if we had a lot to save back in the summer of 96, and Hot Mail proved extremely popular.
07:19Heck, we're betting that many of you watching this know at least one person that still uses the Hot Mail address they created back in high school.
07:26Or maybe you are that person.
07:27Do you still have the same email?
07:29Still Hot Mail?
07:31Don't judge, I'm old.
07:32We're not judging you, but we are glad that Gmail showed up in 2004 with a substantially more generous amount of online storage for their users.
07:41You get about 15 gigabytes of free storage, sometimes more if you link a business account to your personal Gmail and create a G Suite.
07:49But this means it's super important to keep your Gmail inbox as lean as possible.
07:54Number 3.
07:55Top Level Domains.
07:57What's in a domain name?
07:59Well, a lot actually.
08:00They can't sue me if they don't know who I am.
08:03I'll just call myself Mr. X.
08:05For starters, there's the optics involved with professional businesses utilizing a proper dot com.
08:12After all, would you feel safe shopping online from an Angel Fire or Geocities site?
08:17Our competitors, Lycos and Geocities are crushing us.
08:20Those guys are f***ing nerds, Brad.
08:22Elsewhere, computer scientist John Postel's 1986 introduction of top-level domains made it easy to signal out proper non-profits by their dot org designation.
08:34Shhh.
08:35I'm trying to be hit.
08:36www.shhh.com.org.
08:38Then there's domain names that represent certain countries, such as the United Kingdom, or .edu and .gov domains that let users know they're accessing an educational or governmental website.
08:50It's an invaluable piece of internet history that we sometimes take for granted.
08:55So it's all just out there for anyone to surf on the World Wide Web?
08:58All they have to do is type
08:59H-T-T-P-S colon backslash backslash www.google.com backslash number sign Q equal sign Kimmy plus sign Schmidt.
09:07Number two, the first web page.
09:10It's perhaps the most obvious entry on this list.
09:13The ultimate softball when it comes to monumental internet occasions.
09:17Connection was far from instant, but for the earliest internet adopter, this was the reward.
09:22The first ever web page.
09:24It described Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web, how to use it, and how powerful it could be
09:28in terms of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
09:31Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the English computer scientist that brought us the HTTP protocol,
09:37HTML coding language, URLs, basically the entire World Wide Web as we know it today.
09:42So I sort of rode the wave of discovering computers as something which you could actually have in your house
09:48and you could use to solve all kinds of problems.
09:51The very first web page was a primitive thing by today's standards,
09:55but it's virtually impossible to overstate its importance to our online connectivity.
10:00The page was a basic table of contents describing the web's nuts and bolts,
10:04for the millions of us who didn't know what the heck Berners-Lee was talking about.
10:08But it would go on to change just about everything for everyone in its wake.
10:13A new website called Facebook.
10:14I don't have this, no matter.
10:16Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.
10:19The level of natural selection is certainly not the individual organism, nor is it the group.
10:31But it could be some other kind of molecule on another planet, or it could be the meme on this planet.
10:37iPhones. Connectivity gets an upgrade.
10:40We think a million phones will be flying out the door that first weekend,
10:44and perhaps a few more million during July.
10:46The first webcam. Sorry PCs, only Macs could run webcams back in the day.
10:51It took black and white images, not in very high resolution, as I recall.
10:56Blogspots. Journal diaries for a new generation.
10:59Nobody here, but us servantless American cooks.
11:06Netflix streams. Instant video to go along with your DVDs by mail.
11:11I'm going to click on one of my favorites. This is The Breakfast Club.
11:13And you saw right there with a little synopsis.
11:15And this brings up a new window, and you're going to see the At A Glance,
11:18which is pretty much their own synopsis.
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11:36Number 1. Club Penguin launches.
11:39When it comes to the impact of online gaming in internet history, the tip of the iceberg is clearly Club Penguin.
11:46Club Penguin is one of the most interesting games of all time, in that it's extremely important for a specific group of people,
11:52and has mostly disappeared from pop culture.
11:55Alright, you got us. Just kidding.
11:57But let us know what color your puffle was in the comments.
12:01Number 1. Arpanet turns on.
12:03Every major event has a beginning, and the internet was no exception.
12:07Let me take you back in time to the year 1957.
12:12Tensions amongst the democratic U.S. and Soviet Russia is high.
12:18Arpanet was an acronym that stood for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,
12:24having been developed by the United States Department of Defense back in 1966.
12:29They established computer research centers at leading scientific universities.
12:34But computer scientists needed to connect these geographically separate systems
12:38so that they could share research and information.
12:40It was a collaborative group of networks that pioneered many things we take for granted today.
12:46These include file sharing, remote logins, and many other important steps
12:51that could be taken by defense administrators in the event of an emergency.
12:54It was a forward-thinking endeavor that helped lay the groundwork
12:58for the massive connections we currently enjoy with the phones in our pockets.
13:03And it would not have been possible without the pioneering researchers and hackers
13:06who knew computer networks could do more than launch a counter-strike.
13:10What do you think are some of the most defining moments in online history?
13:14Let us know in the comments.
13:15Promoting the information superhighway, Vice President Gore on Wednesday
13:19said he could foresee the day when a youngster just home from school,
13:23given a choice between Nintendo and the Encyclopedia Britannica,
13:28would choose to access the encyclopedia.
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