Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Who invented the internet?
A. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the World Wide Web as we know it (but it’s a lot more complicated than that).
Q. What was the world’s first webcam?
A. The Trojan Room Coffee Cam was a webcam at Cambridge University in England trained on a coffee pot, that began broadcasting live to the internet in 1993, after the browser Mosaic (later Netscape) was released. Before then, the internet was just text.
Q. Who was the first camgirl?
A. Jennifer Ringley began Jennicam on April 14th, 1996. She was the first person to broadcast themselves live, via webcam, 24/7.
Q. When was Google search launched?
A. 1998! Two full years AFTER Jennifer Ringley started Jennicam!
Q. How did people search the internet or find websites pre-Google?
A. Yahoo!: Yahoo! was one of the earliest and most widely used directories on the web. It organized websites into categories and subcategories, allowing users to browse through them to find relevant information.
AltaVista, Lycos, Webcrawler, and Ask Jeeves (later Ask.com) were all search engines that pre-dated Google, and there’s a whole generation of web indexes and directories that pre-date those.
Webrings/web rings were collections of websites linked together in a circular structure. Each site in the ring would typically have a navigation link to the next site in the ring. Users could explore related websites by following these links.
Q. When was [social media platform] launched?
LiveJournal – April 15th, 1999
Friendster – March 2003
MySpace – August 1st, 2003
Facebook – February 4th, 2004
Reddit – June 23rd, 2005
YouTube – December 15th, 2005
Twitter (now X) – July 2006
Instagram – October 6th, 2010
Snapchat – July 8th, 2011
TikTok – September 2016
Q. When did the first webcam hit the market?
A. The black and white QuickCam for Apple computers in 1994, with 320×240-pixel resolution, and a grayscale depth of 16 shades at 60 frames per second, or 256 shades at 15 frames per second.
Q. When did the first camera phone come out?
A. The first commercial phone with colour camera was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. In November 2002, over two years later, the first camera phone, a Sanyo SCP-5300 (also known as the Sanyo Katana), went on sale in North America.
Q. When was the first smartphone released?
A. The first iPhone was released on June 29th, 2007.