YouTube’s founding date was February 15, 2005. Its founders were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three early employees of PayPal. It was their next project after Ebay purchased Paypal and left the three with a windfall. On October 9, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. The name is a reference to the cathode ray tube that was the main component in televisions until the early 2010s. A common nickname for TV during the CRT era was “The Tube.”
YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet. Vimeo launched in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor so it never attained Youtube’s success.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
