Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is turning 30. Though first created in 1989, April 30, 1993 was the first day it was open to the public.

• It’s considered that the first search engine was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

• Marc Andreessen founded Netscape. In 1993 he had already developed Mosaic, the first web browser with a graphical user interface.

• The Internet could have been named the “Galactic Network,” a term used by J.C.R. Licklider in a series of memos written in 1962, in which he described his vision for a globally interconnected set of computers through which individuals could access data and programs from any site. Licklider’s ideas were foundational to the development of what would become the modern Internet.

• The first computer company to register for a domain name was Digital Equipment Corporation.

• In 2002, the average Internet user received 3.7 spam messages per day. Today the number is more than 800 a day, though email service providers filter many of those out.