Internet ! Pamatuju si na dobu, kdy neexistoval…

and then for the time when downloading one image took half an hour and the characteristic sound of the modem was music to the ears 😂

For our generation - the generation of big girls who have experienced the internet since its infancy - it's a nostalgic moment. Let's take a look at some interesting things that aren't seen that often these days.

• First dates: The Internet, then still called ARPANET, began writing its history on October 29, 1969. The message was supposed to read "LOGIN," but the system crashed after sending the letters "L" and "O." So the first word in the history of the Internet was actually just "Lo."
• WWW (World Wide Web): Few people know that it is not the same as the Internet. The Internet is a physical network, while the WWW is a system of linked documents. The first web page was launched by Tim Berners-Lee August 6, 1991. It was about the WWW project and explained how the web works.
• Czechoslovakia on the web: Our country connected to the Internet on February 13, 1992 at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The connection speed was 19.2 kb/s. To give you an idea, downloading today's MP3 file would take hours.

When it comes to the top five, it's not so easy on the internet. There is no "official" list, but we can take a look at some interesting firsts:

• First website: The first website at CERN (info.cern.ch) was soon followed by others. These were mainly academic sites and sites for researchers that tried to introduce new possibilities of the network.
• First items sold: Many internet historians agree that the first thing sold on an e-commerce platform was gramophone record by the band Sting. It was sold in 1994 on the NetMarket website. It was then on eBay damaged laser pointers for $14.83 in 1995. The buyer was a collector, so it didn't matter.

The first internet hoaxes: One of the first hoaxes that still recurs today is the so-called "Nigerian Prince", which promises huge wealth if you send a small amount to complete the transfer. This type of scam, known as "Scam 419", appeared in emails as early as the 1990s. Other early scams included fake car sweepstakes and revealing secrets on how to “get rich online.”

• Dial-up connection: The sound of your modem trying to connect is unforgettable for many. And what about when you forgot you were online and a family member picked up the phone and the call went dead!
• Visit counter: Every website that wanted to be "modern" had to have a primitive counter that showed how many times you were on the page. It was something of a status symbol.
• Blink tag and Gif animation: Pages full of flashing text and tacky, constantly moving images were commonplace. Thankfully, that's long gone now, but back then it was considered the pinnacle of web design.

Today's Google It was far from the first. The first search engines looked completely different and were more like catalogs of websites.

• Archie (1990): It wasn't a website search engine (because the web didn't exist back then), but a tool for indexing files on FTP servers. Users used it to search for software.
• Aliweb (1993): It was one of the first real search engines, but its operation was quite primitive. In order for a site to appear there, site owners had to submit it and send it with a description. No robots, no automatic crawling!
• Yahoo! (1994): It started out as a hand-crafted catalog of websites by two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They called it "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." It later became a full-fledged search engine and one of the most popular companies of the 1990s.
• Google (1998): Larry Page and Sergey Brin have come up with a revolutionary new algorithm PageRank, which ranked pages by their importance (based on the number and quality of links pointing to them). This was the revolution that started the rise of Google.

Before Amazon and Alibaba, there was online commerce, but on a rather small and primitive level.

• Pizza Hut (1994): It became one of the first companies to offer online food orderingTheir system was called PizzaNet and was a technological marvel at the time.
• Amazon (1995): Jeff Bezos founded a company whose goal was to become "the largest bookstore on Earth"But he soon realized that the internet had the potential to sell anything.
• eBay (1995): Originally titled AuctionWeb, was founded by Pierre Omidyar as a place to sell his fiancée's antiques. The first listing, as we said, was a broken laser pointer. eBay popularized online auction sales.

Today's giants like Facebook and Instagram had predecessors who laid the foundation for online communities.

• Classmates.com (1995): The site allowed people to find their old high school and college classmates. While it wasn't a social network in the modern sense (no likes, no walls), it laid the foundation for connecting people online.
• Six Degrees (1997): It is often referred to as the first true social network. It allowed you to create profiles, friend lists, and connect with people. However, it only lasted until 2001.

It is clear that many of today's services have their roots in simple ideas that have gradually developed into huge global companies. What surprised you the most about it?

The early internet was the Wild West – a place where digital dreams and bizarre ideas were born. While the first e-shops tried to sell pizza or books and social networks looked like chat with ugly smileys, gamers were already discovering what it was like when the digital world opened wide. What can computer games do!

Back then, there were no epic battles in World of Warcraft, that was only in 2004!

But games like Doom or Quake rewrote the rules and showed that it's best to share it with a friend online. No crowds, just you and him. A little later, titles like Ultima Online and EverQuest, which showed that the internet can be a huge playground with thousands of people at once.

It was a prehistoric era, full of slow connection, but with an incredible pioneering joy that extended to the phenomenon called Wow. So while some were learning how to order shoes, others were already slaying dragons.

one percentage point of the total content of the Internet is a really huge number for CzechLet's look at it from different perspectives to better visualize it.

• Global comparison: If you were to take the total number of Internet users in the world (which is estimated at more than 5 billion), the number of Czech users represents only a tiny fraction. Yet, content is created in Czech that is capable of filling a full one percent of the Internet. That is a huge amount of text, videos, images, pages, applications and databases.
• Comparison with other languages: Many languages with much larger numbers of speakers (such as Indonesian, Bengali, or Portuguese) do not have such a digital footprint on the internet. This indicates a high digital literacy and activity Czech internet communities.

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Why is this happening?

There are several reasons why the Czech internet scene is so rich and active:

• History and Internet access: The Czech Republic has a long history in IT and gained access to the internet relatively early. Compared to many other countries, the internet has spread very quickly in the Czech Republic and has become a common part of life.
• High level of education: The education system in the Czech Republic emphasizes technical fields and digital skills, which supports the creation of online content.
• Small but compact market: The Czech market is large enough to make it worthwhile to create localized content (translated websites, apps, etc.), and at the same time small enough for creators and companies to know each other and easily collaborate.
• Cultural and social openness: Czechs are generally not afraid to experiment with new technologies and are willing to share information and create communities online, which leads to the constant growth of content.

You can't stop progress... and we definitely want to take advantage of it!

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