Happy Birthday Internet! How big are you now?

The internet is so ubiquitous today and has changed our lives so much, it is hard to imagine a time when it didn't exist. However, until just 20 years ago today, the World Wide Web wasn't a thing. Well, for better or worse, happy 20th birthday, Internet.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The concept for the internet dates as far back as the 1960s, when scientists thought there would be value in exchanging information between computers.  However, the technology to make the system practical wouldn't come online until  the early 1990s.

On April 30, 1993, the first website appeared on the internet. Check it out here.

the first webpage was just text, designed to provide instructions for others who would design the first generation of webpages. There were no graphics, no cats, no memes, and certainly no social networking or shopping.

Prior to this, information could be shared between computers, but it required a direct connection or a connection made via the telephone. There were no webpages, but there were bulletin boards, on which people could share files, games, and chat with others who dialed in. However, on the bulletin boards, you could only do one thing at a time. Multitasking and tabbed browsing were unimagined.

Today everything has changed.

The internet is so ubiquitous, we carry it in our pockets on our phones, which thanks to the internet we also use to play music and games, get directions, read news and books, and keep connected with our friends and more.

We even fight literal wars across its connections.

The first webpage was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. The bare-bones, instructional website was later taken down. Scientists working on the CERN project in Switzerland decided to fix that by reporting a copy of the website here.

Within months, the internet hosted more than 500 websites. Today, estimates say there are more than 630 million websites with at least 45 billion webpages as of today.

Now, the world struggles to live with the beast that is the internet, a vast, unthinking, but knowledge-packed, powerful entity.

Thanks to the internet, there are more smartphones than flushing toilets on the planet.

Anyway, happy birthday, Internet.

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