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Think about the device you have in your pocket or in your hand right now. You have an absolutely godlike amount of computing power inside a device the size, shape, and fragility of a toaster pastry. Not only can it do miraculous things like calculate your age from a picture of your belly button, but it can also talk to all of the other devices on the planet and shame you for missing your morning run.

Back in the 1950s, though, computers were massive room-filling calculators that couldn’t say anything to one another. Computer science labs across the United States, Great Britain, and France were working on that “couldn’t say anything to one another” part, though. Throughout that decade, and into the 1960s, packet networking systems (what humans call the Internet) had been contracted by the United States Department of Defense. The first ARPANET (what would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol) link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. The messages went as follows:

“We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI …” Kleinrock … said in an interview: “We typed the L and we asked on the phone, ‘Do you see the L?’”

“Yes, we see the L,” came the response.

We typed the O, and we asked, “Do you see the O.”

“Yes, we see the O.” Then we typed the G, and the system crashed.

From Gregory Gromov’s Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History (www.netvalley.com/cgi-bin/intval/net_history.pl)

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 with the creation of the Computer Science Network. A year later, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) became the standard networking protocol on that network.

The Web’s History

So, the history of the Internet begins in the late 1950s when those big computers couldn’t talk, and it takes 19 years for the first conversation. So, naturally, let’s begin our lesson in 1980, with the history of the web.

The web is a way of accessing information over the Internet. That is, it’s an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet, using a standard hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

Tim Berners-Lee was an English-born contractor working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. In 1980, he became fascinated with the concept of hypertext. In the simplest terms, hypertext is text displayed in a digital form that references and provides linked access to other text. Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE, a hypertext database system to catalog people and software models. If you’ve ever used a wiki, like Wikipedia, you can grasp the core of what he was building with ENQUIRE. It was a database of hypertext information within which other related information was accessible through hyperlinks.

Early Days

By the mid-eighties, Berners-Lee had left and returned to CERN, still working on a solution to a seemingly intractable problem: Physicists around the world lacked a way to communicate data uniformly. In 1984, TCP/IP protocols were installed on a few machines at CERN, making it, at the time, the largest collection of things that make the Internet the Internet in all of Europe.

In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links.” He began creating this database on a NeXT computer workstation, and called the project the World Wide Web.

By the end of 1990, the World Wide Web was beginning to take shape as something similar to what we know today. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) were in a working state, and the first HTTP server software and web server went online. Accompanying these were the first web pages, which described the World Wide Web project itself. Figure 1-1 shows the earliest known website. The first web browser also came online, as a project housed at CERN.

Figure 1-1: The first website, now housed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

A pivotal moment came on August 6, 1991. Berners-Lee posted a short summary of what was then called the “World Wide Web” project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The summary’s opening was deceptively simple, considering its significance:

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.

Tim Berners-Lee

This summary marked the web’s introduction as a publicly available Internet service, rather than just a private project at CERN.

The Consumer Internet

The web was first made publically popular by the Mosaic browser, which was launched by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (in a building where I once spent eleven hours as an undergrad trying to get an MS Paint drawing of a mouse to solve a maze programmatically).

The browser was graphical (as opposed to strictly textual as in some previous browsers), and became popular due to its rapid feature growth and support of multimedia.

After graduating from the University of Illinois, the team’s lead, Mark Andreessen, formed Mosaic Communications Corporation to develop the browser in a commercial capacity. In April 1994, the company changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was renamed Netscape Navigator.

That same year, PC sales reached a respectable 59 million (M) units shipped.

The Rise (and Fall) of PCs

By 1996, that number had jumped to nearly 70M units sold per year – a trend that only escalated, reaching close to 150M PCs sold in 2000. And during this period, the web continued to expand and occupy a greater part of the digital landscape.

An entire industry grew out of the seemingly limitless potential of the web. The “dot-com bubble” refers to this period, from roughly 1997 through 2000, during which startup companies with entirely Internet-based businesses were formed and received venture capital, intending to change the world by ushering in a new renaissance – one in which we would all have golden toilets and hovercraft and a soda fountain in our kitchen…

Oh.

So it wasn’t limitless, but the companies that could survive did; and despite a one-year slowdown, PC sales continued to grow. Along with them, new browsers entered the market and gained popularity. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, Mac had Safari, along with open-source projects such as Firefox and Opera. More recently Google Chrome has taken the lion’s share of the market. Figure 1-2 shows the amount of PCs sold annually from 1995 through 2007.

Figure 1-2: PC sales from 1995–2007

The Rise of Mobile Devices

During this time, it turns out we weren’t all in such awe of PCs and the Internet that we decided to stop making other technological advances. Cell phones were evolving from simple green-screened boxes, to sophisticated full-color screens used to play Snake, to machines that began to reach the web.

In the meantime, the web itself continued to grow and evolve. The basic timeline of web markup advances can be simplified to the graph shown in Figure 1-3.

You may have noticed that Figure 1-2 ends at 2007. Of course, the Internet didn’t end that year. The diagram stops there because something transformational emerged that year: the iPhone (see Figure 1-4).

From this point forward, mobile phones began to look and act much smarter, hence their new name “smartphone.” With these little pieces of glass, we could now interact with not just a subset of the web, or some web-like features, but the entire web.

Figure 1-3: Overview of mobile-related web markup languages

Figure 1-4: The iPhone: a game-changer

As shown in Figure 1-5, which illustrates the phenomenal trajectory of sales of these devices, we really wanted to do that.

Figure 1-5: PC sales and mobile device sales from 1995–2013

As you can see, mobile device sales beginning in 2007 had a few good years, and then several great years. We’re still in that great category. Mobile device sales have skyrocketed and, as of yet, show no sign of slowing.

The Mobile Tipping Point

In 2011, mobile device sales actually surpassed PC sales (see Figure 1-6). A market already saturated with smartphones received a further sales acceleration with the introduction of a third class of devices: tablets.

According to a Pew Internet survey (www.pewinternet.org/2012/06/26/cell-internet-use-2012/), 55 % of Americans said they had used a mobile device to access the Internet in 2012. More shocking than that, 31 % of these mobile users said that those devices are the primary way in which they access the web.

Mobile-Heavy Usage

An absolutely ludicrous misconception (that I hear nearly daily) about mobile devices is that it is totally fine for them to offer only a subset of the desktop version’s content. Misinformed product managers make the argument that users only need quick, focused tools on their phones. To determine whether this reasoning has any merit, we can look at numbers from some of the top-visited websites in the world.

Figure 1-6: In 2011, yearly mobile device sales outpaced PC sales.

In 2009, less than two years after the mobile tipping point, Facebook’s mobile users accounted for roughly 13 % of its total traffic (20M of 150M). Even in that short time frame, that is not a negligible number. However, by mid-2012, mobile users accounted for more than 50 % of Facebook’s traffic. As of summer 2015, a staggering 78 % of monthly U.S. Facebook traffic comes from mobile devices (newsroom.fb.com/company-info/#statistics). The other social media giant, Twitter, asserts that 80 % of its entire user base is primarily using mobile devices (https://about.twitter.com/company).

Outside of social networking, move than half of all YouTube views now come from mobile devices (www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html). In 2015, year over year mobile revenue on YouTube is up 100 %.

Pew Research has reported that 50 % of teenage (13–17) smartphone owners use the Internet mostly or exclusively on that device (www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/). Similarly, 45 % of adults between the ages of 18–29 mostly use the Internet on their mobile devices.

Mobile Commerce

“But wait,” you may be thinking, “those are only multi-billion-dollar social networks that changed the way we interact on a daily basis. What about e-commerce?” Here’s the thing:

In 2011, $4 billion of eBay’s gross sales came from mobile shoppers. In 2012, this number grew to $13B. In a rather ballsy fashion, eBay expected this trend to hold, and projected that 2013 sales from mobile would reach $20B (techcrunch.com/2013/01/16/ebay-and-paypal-expect-to-do-20-billion-each-in-2013-mobile-commerce/, techcrunch.com/2011/10/09/ebay-vp-steve-yankovich-en-route-to-4b-in-gross-mobile-sales-tctv/). They were pleasantly surprised by an extra $2B in mobile sales on top of that.

Moreover, not only were sales from mobile browsing astronomical, 36 million of eBay’s incremental accounts and users registered on mobile, accounting for 40 % of new users (www.mobilecommercedaily.com/ebay-downplays-offline-retail-play-as-mobile-volume-swells). In 2013, I couldn’t name a single person who hadn’t either

● had an eBay account for at least five years, or

● decided they were never going to need one.

A property then owned by eBay, PayPal, experienced a similar surprise. They, too, projected mobile sales volume to reach the $20B mark in 2013. Actual sales numbers, however, were comfortably at $27B (http://bankinnovation.net/2014/01/paypal-processed-27-billion-in-mobile-payments-in-2013/) instead. PayPal takes 2.9 % of each sale, plus 30 cents. If we estimate the average transaction amount of these sales at a conservative $25, that means that PayPal made a surprise extra $287M off of those $7B in mobile sales that outpaced their own projections.

In August 2014, the founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce platform that powers more than $5B in annual gross merchandise volume, posted this to the company’s blog:

Last week represented the first time in history that more people used mobile phones and tablets to visit online stores than using computers. Looking at data from over 100,000 ecommerce stores that use the Shopify platform, we saw 50.3 % of traffic coming from mobile (40.3 % from mobile phones, 10 % from tablets) and just 49.7 % from computers.

Tobi Lütke (Founder, CEO, Shopify)

Clearly, web creators can no longer afford to ignore mobile device users, because in doing so they will be ignoring the majority of their users.