What Is Internaut Day? 10 Memes To Celebrate The World Wide Web

For those who might have noticed the trending hashtag, Tuesday is Internaut Day is and it’s kind of a big deal for the internet.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher and computer scientist working at CERN, discovered what is now known as the World Wide Web. On Aug. 23 of that year — exactly 25 years ago — the vast ocean of the wide “web” became available to the world.

The name of the widely recognized cult holiday stemmed from the joining of “nauta” (Greek for “traveler”) and “internet.”

According to FirstPost, Berners-Lee originally wished to create a global network comprised of hyperlinked information, and by 1985 the first DNS system was launched in Europe.

The idea of a vast, global “web” was proposed in 1989, which would be an unfathomably large, database comprised of searchable text and embedded links.

In March of 1999, Time named Berners-Lee on its list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20^th Century. The entry for the article, written by Josh Quittner, read, ”From the thousands of interconnected threads of the Internet, he wove the World Wide Web and crated a mass medium for the 21^st century…”

According to Internet Live Stats, there are a total of around 1.07 billion websites online today (although around 75-percent of the sites are not active, but “parked domains or similar”). The one billion mark was reportedly reached in Sept. of 2014, according to NetCraft, which first confirmed the number in an Oct. 2014 survey.

In addition, Internet Live Stats also shows that there are currently 3.4 billion people who are active internet users. To offer some perspective, in 1995, usership was less than one-percent. Today, close to 40-percent of the world’s population has an internet connection.

As the World Wide Web turns a quarter of a century old, we are commemorating the day with the things that are widely celebrated on the WWW – the internet meme.

Scroll down to check out the 10 best memes and gifs from Internaut Day. Happy searching!

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.