Internet Growth 1998–2008
From the BBC: an interactive map showing the growth of the internet over ten years (1998 to 2008). Those dates have some special significance for me, because they coincide exactly with the year I started using the internet regularly (1998) and the year I started working full-time as a web developer (2008). I don’t think I had much effect on the overall numbers though :)
Back in 1998 I was surfing the net on Windows, using Internet Explorer (shudder) and publishing stuff on Geocities (remember them?). One year later, I went to university, got access to shared computers and found a new search engine called “Google”.
Back then, the only countries that had a significant online population were in northern America, Western Europe, and Australasia. It took until 2003/2004 for Russia and China to get a real presence online, and even then only around 20% of the populations of those countries were using the net. That low figure is probably a product of demographics as much as technological uptake, but still — it shows you how young the net really is.