If you are young, you probably feel that the internet has always been with us. If you're not so young, you might be surprised at how long ago many of the milestones of the web have been around. The longest running webcam on the internet has been live for 29 years now. The first set of emojis was released in 1997. The first band to livestream a concert was all the way back in 1993!
I learned these things from Internet Artifacts, a sort of museum exhibit from Neal Agarwal (previously at Neatorama). It begins with a 1977 map of ARPANET that shows 111 computers connected to each other. We have more than that now. It has delicious tidbits like how the White House launched its website in 1994, but it was delayed because they needed more photographs of Socks the cat. The first person to purchase a book from Amazon was dismayed that he was charged money for it. And you might remember that Y2K was a big nothingburger, but that was only due to a lot of work by programmers to head off the disaster. The exhibit ends in 2007, when the iPhone was released and everything changed. -via Metafilter