Five Internet Firsts

Symbolics Inc. registered the first domain name, Symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985, before the real internet was born. Symbolics Inc. grew out of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab, and was the first company to make workstation computers.

CERN launched very first website on August 6, 1991. It was a simple page, similar to a Word document with black lettering on a white background with blue hyperlinks. It briefly described project W3, better known now as the World Wide Web.

The first picture ever uploaded to the World Wide Web on July 18, 1992 was a picture of the all-girl comedy group Les Horrible Cernettes. The group was made up of administrative assistants and partners of researchers at The European Organization for Nuclear Research.

A little-known band called Severe Tire Damage, played live on the Internet for the first time on June 24, 1993.

YouTube was registered as a domain on February 14, 2005. On April 23, 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim posted the first video called 'Me at the zoo'. The 19-second video features Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, talking about his interest in “really, really, really long trunks.”

Incidentally, the Internet is what you connect to and the Web is how you view it.