This is the complete history of YouTube. From cave paintings to YouTube—humans did a lot with information consumption. So if you want to learn the COMPLETE history of YouTube, then this article is for you. Let’s get right into it! Everything Was Better Before—Not Not sure about you, but some days it feels like YouTube is everywhere. It pops up on your newsfeed, webpages, and other Internet resources, sometimes unexpectedly. These days you can listen to your favorite songs, stream a movie, play a video game, learn how to plant potatoes, hear a funny political satire piece, or watch someone cook chicken tetrazzini with just a few keystrokes. Anything and everything is there. All you have to do is ask. It wasn’t always that way. Kids growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s had to work for the information. If they wanted to find a recipe or learn how to plant a garden, they headed to the public library or made a phone call to the appropriate resource outlet, like the state’s regional agricultural extension service, to get the answers needed. To listen to music, they had four choices: If they wanted to watch the latest movie extravaganza, they also had limited options: Videotape players were not mainstream until the late 1980s! So How Did We Get Here? How Did YouTube Become so Ubiquitous? The main answer to both of these questions is technological development. In other words, without the proper technology in place, the ability to stream videos could have never happened. And, as you can tell from the dates above, video-streaming of any kind is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. That being so, it is vital to place YouTube within a full historical context by diving even more profound than what has been described thus far. It Starts with the First Known Recording Of Information In fact, we can go a long way back. Humans have been