F-Secure Celebrates Ten Years In The Web
Helsinki, Finland, 11 May 2004 – F-Secure Corporation was one of the first companies in the world to establish an on-line presence. Our web site has been part of the Internet since 22 April 1994, which makes it by far the oldest on-line antivirus information source anywhere. We are now celebrating ten years of continuous service to roughly 50 million distinct users worldwide, and continue to serve almost one million visitors every month.
“In April 1994, we had already been maintaining our antivirus BBS for several years, and realized how the graphical user interface just introduced by the Mosaic browser could make the Internet accessible to a much larger user base. Practically no commercial web sites existed at the time, but we saw that this www thing was simply so cool that we wanted to be part of it”, comments Ari Hypponen, Chief Technology Officer of F-Secure Corporation. “Nobody knew it would explode like it did”, he continues.
How long a time is ten years? In Internet years, it is a very long time indeed. For example, in April 1994 there was no www.microsoft.com, www.ibm.com or www.apple.com. There were no search engines. No Google, no Yahoo, no MSN, or even Altavista. Likewise, there was no www.cnn.com, www.msnbc.com, www.bbc.co.uk, www.amazon.com, www.ebay.com, or www.paypal.com.
Things like banner ads did not exist. No Java, no Real Audio, no Flash, no MP3 or Divx movies. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Opera did not exist yet. The most common browsers of the time were NCSA Mosaic and Lynx, along with Cello and Winweb.
When we went online, the most common desktop operating system was MS-DOS with Windows 3.11 that lacked a TCP/IP stack and required the use of add-on tools such as Trumpet WinSock. Most web surfers were using Unix-based systems. Windows 95 would only be released in a year and let the masses visit the Internet.
In April 1994, there were around 2,000 web sites in the whole world. By 1996, there were 650,000 web sites. Now the count of public sites is well over five million worldwide.
In 1994, most of the internet data traffic was FTP, followed by telnet, email and Gopher. Today, most of the traffic is created by web browsing, P2P networks and email spam.
Most web sites and web users were coming from universities. Companies were just starting to get to the Internet. Of course, several websites did already exist. In addition to various universities, places like www.un.org and www.whitehouse.gov were already online.
One of the first corporate websites was Digital’s www.dec.com, started in 1993. Of course Digital has since been bought by Compaq which has been bought by HP, online now at www.hp.com. Likewise, F-Secure’s first site was not called www.f-secure.com. In 1994, our company name was Data Fellows, and the site was www.datafellows.com. Some of the services on our site have survived pretty well in their original format throughout the last decade, including our virus description database.
As you can expect, our site was the first antivirus site in the web, and we continue to provide first-class information to our visitors. Now we are celebrating our WEBTENNIAL PARTY with a promotion where we offer a 20% discount on our leading Internet security product.
For a look at our web site through the years, and details on the party promotion, please visit http://www.f-secure.com/webtennial/. We look forward to serving you for many more years to come.
About F-Secure Corporation
F-Secure Corporation protects individuals and businesses against computer viruses and other threats coming through the Internet or mobile networks. Our award-winning solutions include antivirus, desktop firewall with intrusion prevention and network encryption. Our key strength is the speed of response to new threats. For businesses our solutions feature centralized management. Founded in 1988, F-Secure has been listed on the Helsinki Exchanges since 1999. We have our headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, and offices in the USA, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Japan. F-Secure is supported by a global ecosystem of value added resellers and distributors in over 50 countries. F-Secure protection is also available through major Internet Service Providers, such as Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.