A co-worker and friend of mine were talking the other day about the growth of the internet. He has not been a long time fan of the internet. When I first went to work there in 2005 he let me know that he had no interest in owning a computer. He used the internet for getting the current weather forecasts in the morning for the weather segment of his radio shows. He also used it a little for e-mail, but that was about it. A couple years later I was trying to convince him he should get a computer for his home. Once again he told me he had zero interest in owning a computer. Last year he finally got a computer for his home, which he has at his desk in the living room. While I was at his house we were watching something, and we had a question about something we were watching. We were wondering when a movie came out or something like that and he jumped on IMDB and we had the answer.
This got us talking about how remarkable it was that in this day and age we could find the answer to any question, no mater how obscure it was, almost instantly. When I reminded him how he told me a few years earlier, he had zero interest in computers or the internet, he couldn’t believe he even said that.
He was asking me some questions about the internet because he knew I had been on it for a long time. I got on the internet for the first time back in 1993 or 1994. I told him how I remembered seeing a statistic back then that there were 5 million e-mail addresses and about a year or so later that had jumped 30 million. At the time I was blown away by this statistic.
When I got my first computer I was 13 and in 8th grade. It was a used Apple ][+. I loved it and spent many hours everyday after school and in the evening exploring what I could do with it. None of my friends shared my interest or enthusiasm for computers. About a year or so later I got a 300 baud modem and entered the world of BBS’s and spent even more hours staring at my Amdek Color-1 monitor, which by the way still works and is in front of me now hooked up to a wifi security camera. And I still could never get my friends interested in computers. Of course that has all changed and I am now talking to most of them daily on Facebook. But I digress.
Back to my story. My friend, Bob, asked me how many people were on the internet now or how many people had internet access. To which I had to answer I had no idea. There was no way I could estimate or even guess at this point. Tonight I came across a site which has some pretty good statistics about this. So if you are also curious about this you can go to Internet World Stats and get a pretty good overview of it. And one other site I find interesting is the real time statistics at Akamai
Category Archives: statistics
Internet World Usage Statistics
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