23 August: Internaut Day

Not to be confused with Internet Day, Internaut Day celebrates the date on which for the first time in history a permanent connection to the network was established: 23 August 1991.

Although the truth is that this first website was launched a few days earlier, on 6 August of the same year. However, at that time, access was restricted to members of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

The famous 23 August was the day on which the domain was opened to the whole world and people outside CERN were able to access it.

But what is CERN and what does it have to do with what we are talking about?

The first website in history

This first website in history can still be visited: https://info.cern.ch/.

Under the acronym World Wide Web (WWW), the British engineer Timothy John Berners-Lee launched the first web server in history without probably being aware of the total and absolute revolution it was going to mean for humanity as a whole.

The truth is that if we take a look at that first web page, we can see that it has little to do with the appearance and capabilities of today's pages.

It simply had texts, hypertexts and menus, but no colours, no graphics, no animations and much less videos, although it fulfilled the objectives for which it was created: the retrieval of information that would give universal access to a large number of documents.

It was not until 1993 that CERN, where Berners-Lee worked, announced that the web would be open to everyone at no cost, which meant an enormous qualitative leap: from connecting and exchanging information between 10,000 scientists at the Swiss institution to what we all know today.

The 1990s: the internet becomes popular

Spain was no exception to the popularisation of the internet in the mid-1990s, and Telefónica played a key role.

In 1995, the company launched InfoVía, a new service that showed the operator's strategic vocation to access the information highways and whose transforming novelty "was that by simply dialling 055, users of the telephone network, using a modem, could access their Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the price of an urban call, regardless of their geographical location".

A new service that in 1996 already had 215,000 users connected to it.

Also in 1995, Telefónica promoted ISDN, a different type of connection that allowed Internet access without interfering with voice traffic prior to the popularisation of ADSL.

At the end of the decade, in October 1999 to be precise, Telefónica launched its ADSL. In this way, the century-old Spanish operator became the first to do so in Europe, offering different alternatives: from basic ADSL with download and upload speeds of 256kbps/128 kbps to premium ADSL with 2 Mbps/300 kbps.

Search engines and browsers: what is their history and which are the most used in 2024?

The uses and habits of internet users have changed enormously. From those internet connections in the 1990s that involved 'blocking' the landline to the permanent hyperconnection thanks to mobile internet that we experience today, search engines and browsers have been and continue to be some of the tools most strongly linked to the use of this technology.

History and evolution of search engines

In 2024, the most widely used search engines are very different from the Aliweb, WebCrawler or AltaVista that were so popular in the 1990s, although the first search engine in history was considered to be Wandex, although it did not aspire to be one…

Since then, Google has firmly established itself as the most widely used search engine in the world. In fact, it accounts for 91.62% of uses in 2024. Bing is a distant second, with 3.37% of the total. The podium is completed by Yandex with 1.65%.

In fourth place is Yahoo! with 1.12%, a service that was also very popular in the 1990s.

History and evolution of browsers

As can be inferred from their name, browsing the Internet would not be possible without browsers.

Browsers can also be traced back to the time when the aforementioned Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server, as well as the first browser, called WorldWideWeb. It should be pointed out that to avoid confusion with the concept of the World Wide Web, this first browser was called Nexus.

From the beginnings of Mosaic in 1993 or Netscapte Navigator in 1994 to the present day, the possibilities offered and the market share have changed substantially.

For example, Internet Explorer, the most popular browser in the late 1990s and early 2000s, had a market share of more than 95% at the beginning of the 21st century, but now it does not even reach 5%.

In 2024, Chorme - developed by Google in 2008 - leads by far the usage rate with 64.7%. Far behind is Safari, in second place with 18.59% of the total.

Even further back, Microsoft Edge - the successor to the aforementioned Internet Explorer - has 4.98%, ahead of Firefox (3.35%) and Opera (2.86%).

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