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Trivial Pursuit

(or 10 things you might not know about the Internet)
1  How old is it? The Internet as we know it today dates from 1983, but it was largely based on the ARPANET, a research network which passed its first messages on October 1 1969.  So you could say the Net is 30 years old this year.
2  Who invented it? It's really the product of co-operation between thousands of scientists work and engineers, but the underlying technology of packet-switching was independently invented in the 1960s by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Watts Davies in the UK.
3  It was built to survive a nuclear war -- right? Wrong.  The original reason for funding the ARPANET project was to find a way of enabling expensive but incompatible mainframe computers to communicate so that they could become shared resources for the researchers funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense.

4  How old is the World Wide Web?

 Exactly ten years old this year.  It was invented in 1989 at CERN by the English software engineer, Tim Berners-Lee.
5  How many people are on the Net? Nobody knows for sure and it changes by the minute, but the best estimate in Spring 1999 was over 160 million.  For up-to-the-minute estimates follow this link.
6  Is it true that it's the fastest-growing communications medium in history? Yes. It took radio 37 years to reach 50 million listeners, and TV about 15 years to reach 50 million viewers.  The World Wide Web took just over 3 years to acquire 50 million users.
7 Who owns the Net? Nobody, that is to say, everybody.  All the software which runs the Net belongs in the public domain.  Of course the infrastructure on which the Net runs (the transmission lines, computers, servers, switches, etc.) belong to companies, but the Internet itself is common ground.
8  Where does the word 'Cyberspace' come from? A novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984 by the American writer William Gibson.  He described it as a 'consensual illusion'.
9  The Internet is awash with pornography, isn't it? Depends on what you mean by 'awash'.  The Net is the first completely uncensored publication medium in history so you'd expect it to carry porn.  After all, there's a huge market for it in every form -- print, photography, film, video.  In the US alone, for example,  print pornography is an $8 billion business.   So although there is porn on the Net,  it is swamped by all the other stuff on it.  You'd never gather than from reading the tabloid press though.
10  The Net is just billion-channel television, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Television is a 'push' medium.   A small number of content providers and publishers create programming content and then push it at viewers/consumers whose freedom of choice is limited to the range that providers decide to publish.  The Net is a 'pull' medium -- users decide what they want and then ask for it to be delivered to their screens.  And because it's so easy to publish on the Web, the range of choice is unimaginably diverse.  The Net is an active medium, whereas television is passive. 

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