Mind-Boggling Internet Growth From 1984 - 2013 [Infographic]

For just a moment, think about what you were doing back in 1984. Were you in school, were you starting your first job, were you even born? I was just a kid in 1984, and I didn’t even know the Internet existed, but it did. Back then, the Internet linked 1,000 hosts at University and corporate labs. It was considered a privilege back then to be online. This infographic looks at the mind-boggling Internet growth that has taken place from 1984 through today.

It makes you wonder what is to come… Now jump ahead ten years to 1994. What were you doing then? I still didn’t have a computer, but I used the computer lab almost everyday at school. Internet growth was just starting to gain some traction at that time. There were 130 websites in 1993. Only three years later in 1996, there were 100,000 websites. Just to put this in perspective, in 2012, there were 634 million websites.

I have seen a lot of infographics that track Internet growth, but this is the most mind-boggling one of all. By laying it all out in a timeline like this, it really illustrates how far the Internet has come, and how much we, as web users, have grown in the process.

This infographic is called The Incredible Growth Of Web Usage (1984 – 2013) and it’s by WhoIsHostingThis.com. There is a well written accompanying blog post that you can read if you click over on that link. For me, the main thing this points to is not where we’ve come from, but where we are going.

There will be a day when every person on the planet is online. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says that will happen by year 2020 (you can read about that here on CNN Tech). By most standards, the Internet is still in its infancy. If that is true then just imagine where it will be in 50 years from now. Look at this timeline and be amazed.