30 Years of the Internet

• Actress Pamela Anderson is the most mentioned female on the Internet. Her name is hooked up to l,542,28 sites.
• President Clinton is the most mentioned man on the Internet. He is linked to 1,842,790 sites.
• The most frequently used word on the Net is 'sex', typed in 1.55 million times a month.
• A In 1997, Sharone and Jurgen Neuhoff emigrated from Albuquerque in New Mexico to Colchester, Essex, after seeing the town square on the Internet and fell in love with it. 'We liked the body language and the way people dressed,' said Sharone. The couple are still happily living there.
• On June 16 1998 more than 50,000 people watched 40-year-old Elizabeth from Florida give birth to her fourth child, Sean, live on the Internet. Sean arrived at l0.40am weighing 71b 8oz.
• In September 1999, bidding for human kidney on the Internet auction site, eBay reached $5.7 million (£3.6 million) before the company withdrew the listing. It is not known if the offer was real or a hoax. Other 'lots' have included a man who offered himself as a slave (the bidding reached $32) and several mothers offering their babies for sale, before the company was alerted and stopped any bids.
• In 1996, Sharon Lopatka from Maryland became the first woman to 'arrange' her own murder on the Internet. Through various 'chat rooms' and e-mails she asked Robert Glass from North Carolina, whom she nicknamed 'Slow- hand', to torture her and then kill her. After police found her body near his mobile home, he was convicted of pre-meditated murder. (See footnote*)
• In 1998, two American "high-school" students Mike and Diane claimed they would lose their virginity live on the Net. It was later exposed as a hoax - but not before thousands had tried to log on to the couple's personal website.
• Information technology manager Lois Franxhi from Cheshire paid the price of using the Internet at work. She was sacked from her job in July 1998 after she used her computer to try to book a holiday, and lost her claim for unfair dismissal in last June.
• The Internet lead to a whirlwind romance for Gillian Richardson, a 25 year old student. She married Jason Johns, a 27 year old computer consultant at Gateshead register office last year, only one week after meeting on a lonely hearts website.
• The prototype for the Internet was created in the sixties by the US defence Department. Fearing an attack attack from the Soviet Union it created a computer network - the Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpanet) to ensure communications could be kept open even if some were destroyed.
• On October 20, 1969, the first attempt to connect two computers and allow them to communicate with each other was made by researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute.

• The first e-mail ever sent in (1972 ) between computers in two American universities was 'qwertyuiop' (from the top line of a typewriter keyboard).
• Two scientists, Vinton Cerf (dubbed 'father of the Internet') from Stanford and his collaborator Bob Kahn, devised means by which data could be transmitted across a global network of computers in 1974. They were the first to coin the term 'Internet'.
• The Internet has given birth to a huge array of new words, including 'spamming' (sending an item to many people simultaneously); FAQs (frequently asked questions); 'Internet' (someone who is indifferent to the Internet); and 'screenager' (a highly computer literate youth).

• In Britain, ten million adults regularly use the Internet, and 21% of the population go online at least once a month. By the end of the year this will have risen to 15 million.
• Men are the keenest web users 66% of Britons on-line are male.
• British employees spend an average of 30 minutes a day surfing the web for personal amusement, costing their firms an estimated £2.5million a year.
• Hungry surfers were able to order home-delivered pizza over the Net for the first time in 1994 when Pizza Hut launched its web site.
  You can now order all types of food over the Internet, with many UK supermarkets offering home delivery.
• The Internet was the first to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In January last year, a website called The Drudge Report alleged President Clinton had sex with a White House intern and had asked her to lie about their relationship.
• The first court verdict to be recorded on the Internet was posted by Judge Hiller Zobel, who presided over the trial in America of British nanny Louise Woodward in November 1997.
• One of the most popular type of websites - webcams (where cameras are connected to the Net) - first took off in 1991 thanks to a group of thirsty students at Cambridge University. Tired of trailing down flights of stairs to the coffee pot only to find it empty, they trained a camera on the pot which beamed its images to the Internet so the students could see when their coffee was ready - all without leaving their desks.
• When the Queen launched her official royal website in March 1997, it was an instant success. It originally consisted of 150 pages, but became so popular that within a year it had been expanded to 400 pages and recorded 100 million hits.
• A less popular innovation took place in 1997 when the British General Election became the first in our history where all the political parties used the Internet for campaigning.
• A German couple from Munich, Herr and Frau Fasbender, were so pleased with how their shares in an Internet company Yahoo! had done, that when Frau Fasben gave birth this year, the proud parents named their poor baby, Yahoo Fasbender in celebration.
• It was the creation of the World Wide Web that opened up the Internet to computer users outside academia and and military organisations. A global network was created in which computers could 'talk' to each other using, for example, telephone lines. The genius behind this innovation was an Oxford graduate, Tim Berners-Lee. In 1991, he set up the world's first 'WWW' server- a server receives and sends messages - to store the archive of the European Particle Physics Laboratory In Switzerland.
• We may say we love the High Street, but many of us are finding it increasingly convenient to turn to our computers to shop. Last year we spent £230miIllion shopping over the Internet, but by 2003 we will be spending £3,100million - an annual growth of 69%.
• Last year, David Bowie became the first major recording artist to launch an album on the Net; 'hours...' was available on the Net two weeks before it was sold in the shops.
• The Loch Ness Live web site has cameras trained constantly on the mysterious loch in the hope of catching a glimpse of its elusive monster. In June, Mike and Nora Jones from Galveston in Texas claimed to be the first to see Nessie on the Net. They contacted the owners of the site who have published a still photograph allowing surfers to judge for themselves.
• Last year Microsoft gave four volunteers £500 and shut them in separate rooms in London for four days, allowing them to use the Internet to buy food, drink and clothes. The four were filmed by webcams and one - Londoner Emma Gibson, 30 - said she received job offers from Australia and three marriage proposals, none of which she took up.

* Footnote (with thanks to Lisa Small LMS6@georgetown.edu)

Lopatka's killer was not convicted of anything, but chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge -- manslaughter, not murder -- to avoid trial: http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/lopatka8.html#update

At one point, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty, but as often happens in U.S. criminal cases, this was sound and fury meant to satisfy the public and intimidate the defense, and in the long run, signified nothing.

The Lopatka case will always be notorious among computer users, not just for the horrific and peculiar crime itself, but for the waves of attempts to censor the internet it set off in the US and elsewhere.