What is Internaut Day? The birth of the world wide web

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Internaut Day, when Tim Berners-Lee opened up the world wide web (WWW) to the public for the first time.

The word "internaut" comes from the words "internet" and "nauta", the Greek for "traveller" and defined by tech website Tech2 as "designer, operator, or technically capable user of the internet".

The day is distinct from the official birth of the web on 6 August 1991, when British scientists published the very first web page, says Metro. The page, incidentally, instructed users how to set up their own web pages.

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Berners-Lee first came up with the idea of an internationally accessible exchange of information in March 1983, while working at Cern, the European scientific research organisation. He hoped it would allow scientists around the globe to be able to pool ideas and data.

But the technologies involved date back to the Cold War - Nasa wanted to create a network of computers that could communicate with each other after the Soviet Union began attacking telephone systems.

Towards the end of the 1970s, scientist Vinton Cerf created the two computer protocols that allow the systems to communicate: transmission control protocol (TCP) and internet protocol.

It was Berners-Lee's idea to open this technology up to the general public and the WWW was born.

To celebrate Internaut Day, here are a selection of facts about the world wide web:

• the internet and the WWW are actually two separate things - the internet refers to the mass of the computers connected in a network, while the world wide web is the interface used for accessing and sharing information across the network;
• at least 40 per cent of the world has access to the internet;
• there are at least a billion websites on the WWW;
• more than three million emails are sent every second;
• the average UK online shopper spent £1,174 over the internet in 2015;
• the term "URL" for a web address stands for uniform resource locator;
• in 2010, Finland became the first country to make internet access a legal right;
• googling for "cats" turns up 680 million hits;
• when Montenegro declared independence from Yugoslavia in 2006, its internet domain suffix was changed from .yu to .me,
• and finally, we tweet 7,300 times a second