ColdFusion - Historical Internet Firsts
Episode Date: April 20, 2026The internet. What an amazing place. ColdfusTion's First Website: http://www.cfnstudios.com 1:05 First Email 1:36 First Website 3:05 First Picture On The Internet 3:52 First Search Engine 4:30 Fi...rst Blog 5:00 First Book Sold On Amazon 5:46 First Item Sold On ebay 6:23 First Phone With The Internet 7:06 First Internet Celeb 8:02 First Words On Skype 8:52 Reddit/ First YouTube Video 9:19 First Tweet 10:10 First Meme » Google + | http://www.google.com/+coldfustion » Facebook | http://www.facebook.com/coldfustionTV » Patreon | https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV » My music | http://burnwater.bandcamp.com or » http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater » Twitter | @Coldfustion Track List Above & Beyond - You Got To Go (Seven Lions Dubstep Remix) Kasbo - The Wind-Up Bird Duke Dumont - I Got U (feat. Jax Jones) (Kilter Remix) Bodhi - Imperfection Porter Robinson - Sea of Voices (RAC Mix) Ricky Eat Acid - A Smoothie Robot For My Moon Mansion Bear // Face - Taste My Sad Ambassadeurs - Ignite DIALS - Paths Tom Misch - The Journey (See 2 hour mix) James Blake - The Wilhelm Scream (Poindexter Remix) Karl X Johan - Flames (Official Music Video) --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hey, welcome to another episode of Colfuston TV, Degogo here.
The Internet.
Something that was once created to further the chances of the United States of America surviving after a catastrophic Soviet nuclear attack
has now become much larger, much more influential, and more integral in developed society than any thing.
than anything that has ever come before.
The internet has been around since 1978
and the public only gained access in 1991.
As with everything, there's been a few key first moments
that would lead to the internet as we know today.
But what were they and what were the stories behind the individuals
and moments that would become the first steps
in an incredible time for human history?
In this video, you'll learn something
and you'll have a bit of fun along the way.
We'll go through the history of the internet
looking at all the key moments that changed the world.
Here are 14 of them.
1, 1971.
Number 14.
The first email.
The very first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971.
Here's a quote from him in an interview.
The test messages were entirely forgettable.
Most likely the first message was Quirotiyyop, or something similar.
The funny thing was he wrote the program for email in his own time, and nobody at his company really cared about.
it. Ray also pioneered the use of the at sign for the email.
1990.
Number 13.
The first website. It was late in 1990 and Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN Laboratories.
He wanted to make the internet easier to use. At the time he had to literally be an expert
in computer commands just to work the internet. He wanted to link information together
and let users browse at will by themselves. What he had in mind,
was the World Wide Web.
Well, it was in 1989 and the internet already existed
and that you could send email, but there was no websites,
so there was no HTTP, there was no HTML,
there was no space of things you could click through.
And it began because I was frustrated it didn't exist.
I imagined a system where you could just click from one to the other,
and that was so compelling that I decided that I wanted to build it.
And on the 20th of December 1990, the first web page was put up,
and you're looking at it right now,
For the first time, the internet was within reach of the average person.
Everybody could use it now.
The first page was simply just a little bit of a guide as to what the World Wide Web was
and how to use it.
The original page no longer exists, but a later copy from 1992 can be found at this web address.
Here's a fun fact.
As it turns out, the World Wide Web was built on a Next computer and it was actually Steve Jobs
who founded Next during his time away from Apple after being fired in 1985.
So if Steve Jobs hadn't been fired, we may not have to be fired.
have the internet as we know it today. It's amazing how things linked together
when you dig through history.
1992. Number 12. What was the first picture uploaded on the web?
Again it was Tim Berners-Lee and this time was for a bit of fun in 1992. Some of
Tim's fellow employees at CERN formed a parody band in 1990 that were called
the Horrible Surnets or the Horrible Surnets in English. One day Tim just asked for a
few scanned photos of the girls parody group. He said it was just to publish them on
some sort of information system that he'd just invented, called the World Wide Web.
They didn't really think much of it and they handed over the photos and little
did they know that it was going to become a historic moment, the very first picture on
the internet.
1994 number 11. The first search engine. Although internet search engines had been
around even before the World Wide Web, they were very limited in nature and usually
only contained a few page type.
The first full text web search engine, like the ones we have today, was have a guess.
You probably haven't even heard of it.
It was called Web Crawler and it was launched back in 1994.
It wasn't until three and a half years later when Google arrived in the scene.
After this, Webcrawler pretty much faded into obscurity.
Number 10.
The very first blog.
In 1994, five years before the term blog was even coined, Justin Hall was doing just that.
doing just that. Justin's web-based diary was called Justin's Links from the Underground,
and it went online in 1994. It offered an early guide to the World Wide Web, but drifted into
personal territory over time. The New York Times magazine referred to him as the founding
father of personal blogging. It wasn't until 1997 that the term web blog was coined, and
this was later just shortened into the word blog.
1995
Number 9
The first book purchased on Amazon
On April 3rd of 1995
John Wade Wright was working in a very early web joint venture between Apple and IBM
On this day he was given a beta invite to a fledgling company called Amazon
And they were trying to sell books over the fledgling internet
The first book was Douglas Hofstanders, fluid concepts and creative analogies
computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thoughts.
It sounds like such an interesting read.
I think I might go out and get it right now, but maybe not.
But anyway, that was a piece of history, and that was the first Amazon book ever purchased.
Number 8
The first item sold on eBay.
eBay was initially called Auction Web.
Auction Web was founded in San Jose, California, September 3, 1995 by Pierre Omidyar.
The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83.
In 1995, when Peary found out that someone had actually bought his broken laser pointer online,
he was quite perplexed and went on to ask the man if he actually knew that the laser pointer was broken.
And the buyer's response was quite odd.
He said he collected broken laser pointers.
And with that, that was the very first purchase on eBay.
1996 number seven the first mobile phone with internet access the first mobile
phone with internet connectivity was a Nokia 9,000 communicator it was launched in
Finland back in 1996 but unfortunately the actual cost of accessing the internet
was so high that it was actually quite unsustainable it wasn't until 1999 that
i mode was launched in Japan this was considered the birth of mobile phone internet
services and today the impact of the marriage between the mobile phone and the
internet has gotten so large that people say it's changing society in a negative
fashion there's no way you can blame Nokia though
1999 number six the world's first internet celebrity before Puteypie Rebecca
Black general marbles smosh chocolate rain the dramatic chipmunk or keyboard cat
there was one guy who was in before it was mainstream
Mahir Khagri from Turkey. Anyone under 20 probably would be scratching their heads.
This guy was the original internet celebrity. In 1999, his website, Ikissi.org, established him as the
first person to achieve celebrity status solely through the internet. His website was full of
broken English and happy snaps. By 2000, Bill Gates was said to be one of his fans.
Mahira ended up in the Guinness Book of Records for the most visits to a personal
home page with an estimated 12 million hits.
Some say that he was the main inspiration for the Borat movie in 2006.
2003.
The first words ever said on Skype.
The first words said on Skype were not in English but in Estonian in April 2003.
The words were uttered by a member of the development team and I guess he could take a wild
guess as to what they were.
The English translation was, hello, can you hear me?
I guess that's only fitting for Skype's first words.
Skype should have really just been called, Can You Hear Me?
2004
Number 4
So the first person on Facebook was actually ID number 4.
The first three Facebook accounts were used for testing.
You can guess who ID number 4 was.
It was, of course, Mark Zuckerberg.
The first non-founder to join Facebook was Ara'i Hassit.
Sorry if I butcher that name.
He is now studying in Israel to become a rabbi.
After Ara'i, there are 1.3 billion monthly users to follow.
So he started something.
2005 number three the very first YouTube video the first YouTube video was posted
by Jowid Karim at San Diego Zoo it was uploaded on April 23rd 2005 and has been
watched only 14 million times today keep in mind at this time when they posted
the video they had no idea that YouTube would have more daily views than cable TV
2006 number two
The first tweet. The first tweet was written by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21st, 2006.
And it's simply read, just setting up my Twitter.
We've travelled from 1971 to 2006.
And many of the events we've covered have changed the way society interacts, communicates and does business.
These events were the very first moments in some of the fastest growing and largest spheres of influence ever seen by man.
So what is number one?
We'll take a quick break and we'll be back after this.
So, this next event is number one, not because of its date or its significance, but because
of its relevance to the modern internet.
Number one.
The world's first internet meme.
It goes without saying that most traditional internet memes have had their day, and more often
than not, they're just pretty annoying.
But the first meme is actually quite interesting, and it really depends on how you look at
it to answer this question.
The very first meme could be recognized as this.
A smiley face.
It was posted on the 19th of September, 1982, by Scott Fulman.
During Scott's time at Carnegie Mellon University, he noticed that there was no way of expressing
human emotion during text-based forum conversations between computers.
At times, jokes would often be taken the wrong way and lengthy flame wars were common.
Scott came up with the elegant solution of a smiley face.
The smiley face soon caught on and quickly spread to other universities.
We were being silly late at night. We were sending these things around messages, and I proposed this thing.
And I thought it was just another silly message that I sent. You know, I didn't keep a copy of it.
And I noticed about a week later that people were starting to use it around Carnegie Mellon.
A couple of weeks later that we got a message back from some colleagues on the west coast of the U.S.
And they were using it too now.
And they were starting to make these long lists, you know, of many different emoticons.
I only claim responsibility for the colon minus and the parenthesis, smiley face and the frowny face with the nose.
So, some of you out there would not be satisfied with this definition of meme, so let's look at the first meme that is recognizable as a meme in the form as we know it today.
This would be the meme simply known as the Dancing Baby.
It was first let loose on the 22nd of October 1996.
The Dancing Baby originated as a collection of experimental testing data files as a product sample for the
the then groundbreaking 3D character animation software called Character Studio.
It was the first truly viral meme as we know it today.
It found its way into hit shows like Ali McBill, Third Rock from the Sun and The Simpsons,
and many will still recognize it immediately today.
So there you go.
That is literally how many of the aspects of the internet that you're used to seeing each
and every day started out.
If you'd like to know how the internet itself started, please check out part two of The
Greatest Story Ever Told on the Street.
It hasn't gotten many views so far so I'm actually thinking of remaking it and splitting it into a series in smaller chunks.
Anyway thanks for choosing to watch my video and as usual don't forget to rate, comment and subscribe and I'll see you again soon for the next one.
Thanks guys.
