Here is a compilation of all the ‘firsts’ we saw on the internet.

1. The first image posted on WWW.

Working on the World Wide Web project, founder Tim Berners-Lee approached the rock group known as ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’ to be a part of the project. Posting the image, he did not realise that it will turn out to be the first ever image posted on the web.

2. The first ever web page.

WWW, home to a millions of web pages now had its first live on August 6th, 1991. It was about the information on the ‘World Wide Web’ project that was made by Tim Berners-Lee.

3. The first online multiplayer game.

The first multiplayer, real-time virtual game was Multi-User Dungeon, also known as MUD1. This text based game was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex. In case you want to dive into the game world of the era gone by, you can still play the game!

4. The first ever item to be sold on Amazon.

The first ever item to be sold over the popular online shopping site was a book. John Wainwright was the first customer to have purchased the book, Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies from the “bookstore” on April 3rd, 1995.

5. The first ever profile on Facebook.

The famous site’s first ever profile belonged to the co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Launched as ‘FaceMash’ in July 2003, the site was later changed to ‘TheFacebook’ in 2004. The site was originally meant to be limited within the walls of Harvard University till 2006, where anyone over the age of 13 could register.

6. The first ever Instagram post.

Yes, the first ever image on Instagram was a doggo! Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom posted this adorable photo of his pup back in July, 2010. However, the site did not go live till about three months after.

7. The first ever Wikipedia page.

Originally UseModWiki, the site did not keep the history of the pages intact when it shifted to a new phase. However, with the help of some work and luck, Brion Vibber discovered a cache of this missing data. The first page, which was recorded on Wikipedia was in January 2001.

8. The first use of emoticons.

What is life without expressing our state of emotions through a bunch of emoticons? On September 19th, 1982, a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman made this happen with his use of a smiley and a sad smiley, making it out to be the first ever documented use of the human emotions on the web.

9. The first ever search engine.

Before Google was the Archie Query Form. Developed by the ever so curious, Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, the site was founded in 1990. It is still in use for its historical purposes by the University of Warsaw’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling.

10. First ever webcam to live stream.

“Who finished the coffee?” A question the researchers at the University of Cambridge often asked back in 1991. Hoping to catch the culprit, the scientists decided to install a camera to find out who finishes the coffee jar and leaves it empty. Developing a simple program to capture the images one after the other,and then putting it together, the display as a small thumbnail of the coffeepot in real time solved their query, thus introducing the first ever webcam.

11. The first ever tweet.

On March 21, 2006, co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey posted the first ever tweet and the rest is history. Twitter is now a well established site with over 300 million users.

12. The first ever ad to be seen.

The ever so irritating internet pop-up ads were first seen on October 27th, 1994 on a website, Wired.com (then known as HotWired), was an AT&T advertisement. From that day, to now, ads are an integral part of life on the internet.

13. The first ever Google page and search.

World’s most popular search engine first came into existence in September 1997. Before being called Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named it BackRub. The pair, while pitching their idea, showed the site to computer scientist, John Hennessy, who typed in the name ‘Gerhard Casper’, who, at the time, was the president of Stanford. Impressed with the accuracy of the results, the scientist found it better than the rival search engine. Thus, marked it to be the first ever recorded Google search in history.

14. The first ever YouTube video to be posted.

‘Me at the zoo’ a video posted by ‘Jawed’ or Jawed Karim, who happens to be site’s co-founder, published the first ever video on YouTube on 23rd April, 2005. This, we suppose, also makes elephants the first ever animals to be featured in a YouTube video.

15. The first ever “.com” domain to be registered.

Back in 1985, a Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer by the name of Symbolics registered the first ever domain, symbolics.com. While the company may not be present anymore, the domain still remains the oldest domains around. 

16. The first spam email.

Seven years after the introduction of communicating over emails, was the introduction of the first ever spam email. A commonplace now, our emails are flooded with plenty of spams. But back then, when the internet had only a few hundred users, each one of those users received an unsolicited invitation to a tech presentation being hosted in Southern California.

17. The first item to be sold over eBay.

Originally called AuctionWeb, the site was put to test in 1995, by posting a broken laser in the hope to find somebody who would purchase it. And someone did buy it for $14.83. Surprised, they asked the buyer why he would buy a broken laser, they were told that t=he was a collector of broken lasers. And since then, the site has seen the purchase of many items.

18. The first ever email.

In 1971, computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent a few messages to himself. He did so using the ‘@’ symbol for direction, from one machine to another. According to him, he sent, “Something like QWERTYUIOP.”

19. The first online payment.

Along with the establishment of the internet, came the online payment services that started to operate in the first half of the 90s. It was in1994 when Stanford Federal Credit Union was established. The first financial institution which offered online internet banking services to all of its members. However, the transaction process came with its own set of complications as they weren’t user-friendly and required specialised knowledge of encryption or data transfer protocol.