Dial-Up for This Quiz on the Early Internet

Briefly named Beverly Hills Internet, GeoCities was a web-hosting platform where users could create their own websites while also browsing others. When Yahoo! acquired the service at its height in 1999, GeoCities was the third-most-visited website on the internet. Although it closed its digital doors in 2009, GeoCities is seen as one of the first social media platforms and the first to embrace user-generated content.

In 2002, Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn created the flash animation of a banana dancing to the song “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” by the Miami-based band the Buckwheat Boyz. The viral animation spread through message boards and became one of the internet’s earliest, strangest, and most endearing GIFs.

The first object sold online via an electronic transfer of money was a copy of Sting’s 1993 album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” in August 1994. The CD was sold for $12.48, plus shipping, by Dan Kohn via a website he created called NetMarket. Since then, electronic music sales and streaming have come to dominate the music market.

E.M. Forster is known for his novels centering the English middle class, but he also wrote an influential science-fiction story called “The Machine Stops” in 1909. In it, he describes a world where people spend their entire lives inside on their computers. His characters electronically communicate, access entertainment, and shop via the vast network Forster simply calls “the Machine.”

Jeff Bezos came up with the idea for Amazon in 1994. He originally wanted to call his company Cadabra, but was talked out of it by his lawyer, who thought it sounded similar to the word “cadaver.” While the e-commerce company initially only sold books, Bezos always planned for the site to one day become “an everything store.”

The first message was sent from one computer to another in 1969. A small group of researchers at UCLA successfully sent a message to a computer located hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. Research student Charley Kline typed out the word “Login,” but the network crashed, so only “Lo” was sent. It was still a momentous breakthrough.

Approximately 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single day. Even if you wanted to, you could never watch everything on the site. It all began with an 18-second video in 2005 titled “Me at the Zoo.” The clip shows YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in front of some elephants. Perhaps not the most auspicious start, but just one year later, YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion.

The first-ever webcam was set up in 1991 in the computer research lab at the University of Cambridge. Because there was only a single coffee pot, researchers wanted a convenient way to check if there was any available without leaving their desks. So, they set up a camera to watch it. Today there are webcams that allow you to watch baby pandas, Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the northern lights, and more.

A famous sketch from the British television show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” is responsible for the word “spam” to mean unwanted messages. In the sketch, a restaurant offers a menu full of dishes that contain the canned meat Spam, which causes uproar among the diners. Although the sketch aired in 1970, the word didn’t appear online until multi-user dungeon users in the late 1980s began “spamming the database.”

Originally named Mosaic, Netscape Navigator was the first major web browser used by the masses. Launched in 1994, Netscape allowed easy access to websites and message boards on the internet. However, Netscape’s supremacy didn’t last long, as Microsoft launched Internet Explorer just one year later.

A uniform resource locator, or URL, is essentially the name of a webpage and how it is found. Full URLs are broken up into several parts. The first part, "http," is the protocol or format that you will be using. The domain is the first unique string of characters that follow. Slashes are then used to signify additional pages, beyond the homepage, within a domain.

Tom Anderson founded the early social media website Myspace in 2003, and guided it toward becoming one of the most popular sites on the internet. When users created a new account, before connecting to their friends, their first friend was always Tom, who greeted them in his profile picture with a smile.

The first frontier of online piracy came in the form of music and video peer-to-peer sites like Kazaa and Limewire. Napster blazed the trail and had around 60 million users by 2001, but the court case “Metallica et al. v. Napster” eventually led to the website filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidating all of its assets.

Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson was working on a precursor to the internet, called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), when he created a simple way for text messages to be sent between computers. But Tomlinson did not recognize the significance of the first email, and simply typed out the top row on his keyboard. We also have him to thank for the use of the @ sign in email addresses.

The first computers to join the World Wide Web used dial-up modems to establish a connection with servers. These modems made a complex, high-pitched noise as they logged a computer on to the network. These noises, while incomprehensible to human ears, were known as a “handshake” — the computer and server negotiating to work out the best method of transmitting data.

In the 1990s, a 3D model of a dancing baby took the internet by storm. It was also known as the “Oogachacka Baby,” after the music played over the animation of the jiggling, diapered tot. The meme didn’t stay confined to the internet for long — it became famous for its appearances on the TV show “Ally McBeal” (1997-2002).

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located on the French-Swiss border, is one of the premier sites for nuclear physics research in the world. It was while working there in 1989 that scientist Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for a web of connections between computers to allow scientists to share their data. The invention of the World Wide Web paved the way for the modern internet.

On AOL Instant Messenger, a door squeaked open or slammed shut when someone from your buddy list logged on or off. The noise is one of the defining sounds of the early internet, along with the cacophonous symphony of dial-up modems and the famous “You’ve got mail” catchphrase. Although door noises were the default sounds, users could customize the tones or turn them off entirely.

Launched in the spring of 1997, Ask Jeeves was a character-driven search engine that could “answer” questions asked in normal human speech. Although popular upon its launch, the search engine fell victim to the rise of Google, which launched a year later. By 2005, Ask Jeeves was rebranded to Ask.com, and by 2010, Ask abandoned its search-engine origins entirely.

Al Gore was one of the most prominent supporters of the early internet. The High-Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 was known as “The Gore Bill,” and the former Vice President also authored essays on the importance of these burgeoning information systems. In 1991, Gore’s bill created the National Information Infrastructure, which he dubbed the “information superhighway.”