How Far the Internet Has Come

It's amazing how much we can take for granted. On any given day, we can, and do find ourselves on the internet, looking up information, emailing prospective clients, socialising with our friends in real-time and publishing content. We sometimes forget that not too many years ago, none of this was accessible to us.

Instead of tracing all the way back to 1958, lets start at the modest date of 1976, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer. It was also the year that Queen Elizabeth II sent out an email! It wasn't until 1984 that they introduced the first Macintosh- the original version of what we all know well as a Mac. Apple then fell behind the PC market who had sold 25 million units in the US in 1987. Also by 1987 there were 10,000 hosts on the internet and 100,000 hosts within the next two years.

Most people are familiar with the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000. Tons of dot-com ventures had to terminate trading after burning through their venture capital. Many of them went under without ever having made any profit. By September of that year there were 20,000,000 websites on the internet.

In December 2003 a research project launched called 'How much information 2003'. It found instant messaging generates 5 billion messages a day.

In 2005 Youtube.com launches and by 2006 there are approximately 92 million websites online. Also in 2006 Google.com buys Youtube.com and in 2007 Apple had exceeded one billion iTunes downloads. According to Internet World Stats, in March of that year 1.114 billion people were using the internet. By April of 2007, Google beat Microsoft in being the most valuable global brand.

From Microsoft acquiring Hotmail in 1997 to Facebook being launched in 2004, eBay acquiring Skype in 2005 and Twitter launching in 2006 there is no shortage of online communications channels. Today social media is the number one way people communicate with one another online. It began as a way to keep in touch with friends and family, grew as a way to correspond with clients and internal staff, and has now become a measurable and social way to collect market research data and use it to improve product placement and spread brand messaging.

We have the internet to thank for our growing global marketplace, as well as the world becoming one based on sharing and personal connections. Enough about that, time to get back to browsing Youtube videos, checking out friends' pics on FB and tweeting some cool articles.


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Adaptive Consultancy is a digital agency specialising in web development, design, ecommerce and internet marketing. Services include SEO, paid search, email and social media marketing. For more on internet marketing agency London visit http://www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/internet-marketing-agency