Things you possibly didn't know about the Internet

The internet is so part of our life, that even if you want to do the annual income tax return for the government, we have to have the computer and the Internet. In addition we have a bunch of many other public services in our hand 24 hours a day. But little by little this technology came up to our life that today we can say that "We Cant Live Without".

However if we rewind some points about the Internet, we have some interesting facts:

- As in Brazil the soup operas are very popular, the first time that was mentioned the term was at "Explode Coração" in 1995, at that time a few people (almost anyone) had connection to the network.

- The radio took 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million people; the TV took 13 years; and the internet only 4 little years.

- When we think about a research on the Internet, the Wikipedia is one of the first links of the result. But before Wikipedia there was the Nupedia, and it was created by the same people in March of 2000 and lasted until September of 2003. The main difference between Wikipedia and Nupedia was the rigorous selection  of articles, and all were done by specialists like PhD. Nowadays, Wikipedia has more than 17 million of articles, and more than 680 thousand of those are in Portuguese (data of March 30, 2011).

- The e-mail we know today was created by a guy called Gary Thuerk in 1971. Before that, it was only possible to send messages by e-mail using computers that were connected to each other. What did he write in that first e-mail?? ... Neither he remembers!!

- After having invented the first e-mail, of course someone invented the first spam. In 1978 a guy called Gary Thuerk, marketing manager of the Digital Equipment company, had an idea to send an advertising e-mail to the the masses.

- The first item sold at eBay was a broken laser pen by 14 dollars. Nowadays eBay is one of the biggest platform of sales in the World.

Well, there are a bunch of many other interesting histories about this fantastic tool of communication that changed the World forever and the way we see the World.