Email is just one example of the kind of explosive growth experienced by the Internet—making sending a letter almost obsolete. Since the inception of the Internet in the late 20th century, it has quickly evolved into a necessity for our daily lives; providing may famous firsts.

For example, did you know that in 1992, the first photograph was uploaded to the Internet? Now, over 20 years later, 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared daily. The world wide web has truly come a long way and this infographic by WebpageFX takes a look back at some famous firsts that happened online.

Check out more interesting facts below.

Famous firsts on the Internet: Now & then

Early Firsts

The year 1971, the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson. As of 2014, 183 billion emails are sent daily.

May 3, 1978: The first spam email was sent by Gary Thuerk to 400 people within APPANET, inviting them to his company’s new product demo. Today 54 billion spam emails are sent daily.

March, 1985: The first domain ever registered was www.symbolics.com. Today there are 271 million registered domain names.

The 90s

The first search engine was ARCHIE—archive without the v—created in 1990. Today there are 45,587 Google searches per second.

The first website went live on 08.06.91; created by Tim Berners-Lee. As of September 2014, 1 billion websites exist.

Say “Cheese”. The first photo uploaded to the internet was in 1992. Today 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared daily.

On August 11, 1994, the first eCommerce transaction was for Sting’s CD “Ten Summoner’s Tales” on NetMarket’s site for $12.48. In 2014, eCommerce sales were projected to be $1.5 trillion.

In October of 1994, the first banner ad was posted on hotwired.com. It promoted 7 different art museums and was sponsored by AT&T. 5.3 trillion ads were served up US users in 2012.

The first book purchased on Amazon was on April 3rd, 1995. It was titled “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought”. On Cyber Monday 2013, Amazon sold 426 items per second; that’s 36.8 trillion items in 1 day.

Famous firsts at the turn of the century

The first non-founder to join Facebook was Arie Hasat in 2004: Zuckerberg’s roommate. Today there are 1.3 billion monthly active users. 1.1 billion of them are on mobile.

04.23.05: the first YouTube video was posted by Jawed Karim. It now has over 16 million views. Today, 6 billion hours of video are watched monthly.

The first tweet, “I’m just setting up my TWITTR” was by co-founder Jack Dorsey: 03.21.06. Today, 500 million tweets are sent per day.

The first Instagram post was by co-founder Kevin Systrom on 07.16.10; the photo was of a golden retriever. Today, 60 million photos are posted daily.

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Now you can discover what happens on the Internet in real-time with this ‘live’ infographic.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/famous-internet-firsts-now/