Time Capsule: The Internet A Decade Later
Quick, do you remember your computer setup 10 years ago? It’s a bit hazy now, but I can recall sitting at a particle board desk with a gray Hewlett-Packard PC, my feet propped up on the giant, heavy computer tower on the floor. If I wanted to share something with a friend, I had to save the file to a zip disc or burn it to a CD. My mouse was attached to the computer with a cable that continuously got in the way. But what was I clicking on with that mouse? How did I spend my time on the Internet back then?
This awesomely animated infographic created by Bestedsites.com, is helping me remember. Some interesting data points:
- There are 185 times as many websites today as there were in 2002. Hey, people need places to put cat pictures!
- Ten years ago, Internet Explorer was the dominant web browser for 95% of the world’s internet users. Now it only accounts for 39% of the world’s usage. And web developers everywhere rejoiced. Yayyyy!
- The biggest search term in 2002? Spiderman. The biggest search term today? Rebecca Black. That’s right, just try to get that song out of your head now. I’m sorry.
- Almost all of our social networks were developed inside the last ten years. That’s right. You weren’t looking at a friend’s photos on Facebook in 2002, because Facebook didn’t even exist. Makes you wonder what you did with your free time, right?
It’s fun to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but along the way you realize just how drastically things have changed — online and off. Faster broadband speeds mean more image-heavy, aesthetically-pleasing websites. Higher monitor resolutions mean that we can take a website out of its old boxy limit of 760 pixels wide. And we can share files almost instantly through “the cloud.”
Makes you wonder what 2022 will look like, huh?
