It’s hard to imagine a world without the interne – in fact it’s becoming difficult to remember what the world was like before we were all online.

Bank cheques, real mail, wall phones and typewriters seem like quaint trinkets of a time long ago.

However the internet is only 25 years old, so to celebrate the milestone we look back at how much the world has changed over the past quarter century.

Who’s your daddy?

British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited as the creator of the internet. On March 12 1989 Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to present information like text, sounds and images, through a new application called a web browser.

The internet wasn’t Berners-Lee’s first choice on a name. He also considered calling his creation The Information Mine (or TIM).

Slow start

Back in 1995 just 14 per cent of adults in the US had internet access. Now 78 per cent of the population of North American is online.

In the 90’s only 2 per cent of people accessed the internet via a “high speed” 28.8K modem. This meant some internet pages might only take three minutes to download.

Now mobile users expect a page to load in three seconds or less.

Two billion

There are now over 2.4 billion users, close to half of the global population.

Interestingly, there are 5 billion mobile phone users. By 2015 mobile internet users will outnumber their desktop counterparts.

Gone in 60 sixty seconds

Over a typical minute here’s what happens on the internet: Google processes 2 million searches, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 1.8 million Likes are generated on Facebook and 204 million emails are sent.

If you wanted to copy the entire internet to a DVD you would require over 1 billion discs.

Webcams

While webcams are ubiquitous with video chatting these days, the first webcam was used to monitor a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

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