The First Ever Email, the First Tweet, and 10 Other Famous Internet Firsts

When was the first email sent, and who sent it? What was the first ad to ever run on a web page? How about the first picture uploaded to the Internet?

Here are 12 famous Internet firsts that were monumental in shaping web history.

1. The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971. "The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar," he said.

2. The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. Now it serves as a historic site.

3. The first website was dedicated to information about the World Wide Web and went live on August 6, 1991. Here's the url: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

4. The first picture ever uploaded on the web was posted by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) on behalf of a comedy band called Les Horrible Cernettes.

5. The first AOL Instant Message was sent by Ted Leonsis to his wife on Jan. 6, 1993. It read, "Don't be scared ... it is me. Love you and miss you."

His wife replied, "Wow ... this is so cool!" Leonsis later became AOL's Vice Chairman.

6. Joe McCambley ran the first banner ad ever online. It went live in October 1994 on HotWired.com and it promoted 7 art museums, sponsored by AT&T.

7. The first item sold on eBay (back then it was AuctionWeb) was a broken laser pointer for $14.83 in 1995. The man who bought it told founder Pierre Omidyar he collected broken laser pointers.

8. The first book purchased on Amazon was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thoughtin 1995.

9. The first sentence uttered on Skype was in Estonian in April 2003 by a member of the development team. It was 'Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?' or "Hello, can you hear me?" in English.

10. Mark Zuckerberg was the first person on Facebook with ID number 4 (the first three Facebook accounts were used for testing). The first non-founder to join Facebook was Arie Hasit (below), who is now in Israel studying to be a rabbi.

11. The first YouTube video posted was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. It was uploaded on April 23, 2005 and has been watched nearly 10 million times.

12. The first tweet was written by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.