11 Firsts In Internet History (page 2)
Published Monday, August 24, 2009 at 10:00:00 AM - Single-page view


  1. A screenshot of Archie.
    First Search Engine. The first search engine was called Archie, and was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I didn't look up what has since happened to Alan, but I assume at some point around 2004 he hung himself by his neck in his fucking closet for not pushing himself just a slight bit harder and coming up with Google.

    Anyway, you can still use a version of Archie here... but, for whatever reason, it only lets you search worldwide anonymous FTPs or Polish websites. Only searching Polish sites? Such a fall from grace for the first-ever search engine. Just another reason why Alan's decomposing body was probably found by the police with things like "Gmail" and "Adsense" and "I'm feeling lucky" carved into his flesh. [Source]

  2. First Domain Name. The first domain name ever was Symbolics.com, registered on March 15th, 1985, by a computer manufacturing company called Symbolics... that no longer exists.

    Their fatal flaw was staking their entire company on a programming language called Lisp. To draw a metaphor, that's like starting a restaurant and declaring that the main ingredient in everything you cook is going to be pickled herring. That's like founding a porn studio but only releasing your movies as 8mm filmstrips. That's like getting an NFL expansion team and building it around Tim Couch. [Source, includes the 100 oldest .coms]


  3. First YouTube video. The first YouTube video features Jawed Karim... who's like the Brian Dunkleman of YouTube founders... standing at a zoo, talking about an elephant. It was posted on April 23rd, 2005.

    Like most YouTube videos, it's so boring that it manages to make 19 seconds feel like a solid two minutes. Karim is the far more interesting story -- I love this article in "USA Today" where Karim casually mentions that, even though he's not considered one of the two guys behind YouTube, it was all his grand idea. But he let the other guys have it because "my only interest was in helping the company get off the ground." Of course. And Vin Diesel only came back to be in "Fast and Furious" because he really connected with the script.


  4. Cohen's Sex.com business card, complete with not-at-all-sketchy Tijuana address and BVI holding company.
    First Porn Website. It's hard to prove definitively, but it's believed that the first porn site was sex.com. It was registered in 1994 by a guy named Gary Kremen.

    Yes, that rhymes with semen. However... Gary did not have pornographic intentions with sex.com. At least that's what he says today.

    A guy named Stephen M. Cohen, which rhymes with bone (and "moan"... and "sex, phone" and "she moves her body like a cyclone"), DID see the pornographic potential of the domain. So he contacted Network Solutions, which administrated all domain names back then, and fraudulently had the ownership of sex.com transferred to his name using a series of fake faxes and forged documents.

    He quickly turned it into a thriving, profitable and dirty porn site.

    Kremen was furious, and sued Cohen. After a long court battle, Kremen won a $65 million judgment and got the rights to sex.com back. Before he could get the money, though, Cohen fled to Mexico and moved his money to an offshore account. He was tracked down in 2005 and turned over to U.S. authorities.

    Kremen sold sex.com for $12 million. In between fighting for sex.com, he had the time to found match.com. Which, I'd guess, has led to exponentially more actual sex than sex.com. [Source]

  5. First Member of Friendster. Founder Jonathan Abrams, profile #101 was the first member of Friendster. And may also be its last one left.
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This list was published on Monday, August 24, 2009 at 10:00:00 AM under the category Web & Tech.

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