I can understand the feeling that it seems so young. But If we take into account that the World Wide Web, a public network, (or in other words, a non-military/government/higher education based network,) started in 1989 and opened up to the public in 1993. As for U.S. American’s (and probably other countries as well), the internet infrastructure wasn’t wasn’t well established and ready to take on 10’s of millions of WWW users daily. It wasn’t until 1996 in the U.S., where we would have around 3,750,000 internet service users. (Using the population info from here for the rough estimate.) And according to the graph below, it wasn’t until about midway through 2001 when the U.S. crossed over the 50% population with internet access.
So what I’m highlighting here is that, Wikipedia.org going live in 2001 is actually impressive for it’s time. And it’s old in comparison to a lot of main-stay websites. Also, remember Wikipedia wasn’t asking for users to pay a monthly subscription or have to deal with seeing ads on the platform. So server costs even then, were being funded in other ways. All of that to me is seriously impressive.
I can understand the feeling that it seems so young. But If we take into account that the World Wide Web, a public network, (or in other words, a non-military/government/higher education based network,) started in 1989 and opened up to the public in 1993. As for U.S. American’s (and probably other countries as well), the internet infrastructure wasn’t wasn’t well established and ready to take on 10’s of millions of WWW users daily. It wasn’t until 1996 in the U.S., where we would have around 3,750,000 internet service users. (Using the population info from here for the rough estimate.) And according to the graph below, it wasn’t until about midway through 2001 when the U.S. crossed over the 50% population with internet access.
(image from here)
So what I’m highlighting here is that, Wikipedia.org going live in 2001 is actually impressive for it’s time. And it’s old in comparison to a lot of main-stay websites. Also, remember Wikipedia wasn’t asking for users to pay a monthly subscription or have to deal with seeing ads on the platform. So server costs even then, were being funded in other ways. All of that to me is seriously impressive.