Katherine Young

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Katherine Young (鄭珣; Pinyin: Zhèng Xún), (May 10, 1901 - October 24, 2005) was a centenarian, and was the oldest known living user of the Internet^{[citation needed]}. She was a resident of Palo Alto, California.

Young was born in a small Hakka village in the Fujian province of China, and attended college at Yenching University in Beijing. She married Paul T.J. Young, and raised four daughters in China while staying one step ahead of the Japanese invasion of 1937. After the war ended, the family lived in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and eventually immigrated to California in 1958.

She served as president of the Lytton Garden Rose Club until 1998, when she decided she needed a break. Needing something else to do, she took a 12-week-long computer class offered at her retirement home that taught seniors to use WebTV. By the end of these sessions, she was logging on, and became an activist for the cause of encouraging seniors to use the Internet. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study showed that only 18% of Americans 65 and older get online, as opposed to 58% of the American population as a whole.

Five years later, on her 102nd birthday, she became a celebrity for being the oldest person to surf the Internet. She was feted with numerous birthday emails and an emailed sonogram of her great-grandson, who was eventually born in August 2003.

She studied Chinese genealogy on Google, and researched roses (having been Rose Club president for 16 years). She used email to communicate with her ten grandchildren and told reporters she checks for new messages as many as six times a day.

From her apartment, Young accessed the Internet via MSN TV (formerly WebTV) Internet service provider. Microsoft recognized her achievement and gave her a golden lifetime subscription.

Though Young was considered the oldest known living user of the Internet, it should be noted that Audrey Stubbart (1895-2000), a copyeditor and columnist for the Independence Examiner until very shortly before her death at age 105, used the Internet at a greater age.