In the beginning, Man created the Internet, the grand experiment of the Information Age.
Commissioned by the Department of Defense, the Net was at first intended as a means for nerds at UCLA to show how much smarter they were than nerds at MIT. The government meanwhile thought the nerds would turn this new Inter-Net they were funding into something, I don’t know, defense-y but they were too afraid to look stupid to ask the nerds what they were really doing with the money so unlike other government projects something got accomplished.
Within a short time more universities and government agencies joined and this new medium grew by leaps and bounds. Nerds rejoiced. Lofty ideas were exchange and many a hexadecimal taunt was flung across the ether in this rarefied and exclusive environment.
It was Nerdvana,
Sadly this pure nerdtopian society could not last.
The first signs of trouble began when some seriously misguided individual, in the name of egalitarianism, threw the doors open for the state colleges to join the network. Soon every Neanderthal that needed to complete 2 credit hours in a science logged on and began to trade misspelled insults with their betters, threatening to find out where they lived and come over and beat the crap out of them if they didn’t stop using big words that they didn’t understand but which their rudimentary and dull simian senses told them were insults.
The nerds went underground.
Some began sporting monkey avatars.
But there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Companies like Delphi, Prodigy and CompuServe dog-piled on the Internet and began offering UNIX shell accounts to anyone who could manage to type out a % ncftp ftp.dumdum.net > get fartjokes.txt command string with their stubby paws.
In spite of UNIX things were looking dismal for nerds on the Internet. Until one day a lowly nerd touched by the divine inspiration of the Nerd Ghods and graced with mad skillz discovered that naughty pictures could be distributed over the Net via multipart MIME encoded messages.
And the Nerd Ghods saw that it was good.
Crazy days and sleepless nights drinking coke by the litre and scarfing entire bags of Cool Ranch Doritos whilst searching for the bottom half of Elle Macpherson followed.
oh please got to be
here somewhere.
gotta gotta gotta.
Just as nerds were beginning to enjoy this new found thing called “women,” another wave of immigrants washed over the Net thanks to a company called America Online. America Online (AOL) became notorious for handing out free 50hr Internet access disks in trucks stops, trailer parks, VD clinics and asylums for the criminally insane. At one time I believe you could pay your AOL bill in either food stamps or picked scabs.
After AOL, a bunch of other stuff happened, none of it important and little of it good except for more porn delivered at ever faster speeds. OK. I guess that is pretty cool. But regardless, if there was ever such a thing as netiquette it died with AOL because there were so many people online now that nobody knew who or where anyone was anymore. The web became one big wild commercialized jungle populated by packs of feral netizens. A Disney ride for the deranged. It was survival of the dimmest.
We adapted.
Shouting in caps replaced beating the shit out of each other with clubs for this new breed of digital caveman and nerd muscles grew to incredible proportions behind the safety of japanime avatars and seven to nine proxy servers.
The Net became a Nerdnarök* of perpetual battle with gleaming valkyrie carrying off fallen heroes to porn Valhalla.
Nobody told us what the rules were – there were none – so we made up our own. Left to our own devices we were free to follow our passions and sometimes to be ruled by them. Online communities grew like bacteria colonies only to be eradicated seemingly over night by the whims of the new web economics. Changing and devolving mercurially at the speed of an instant regret messenger to arrive… where?
Here.
A Really Brief History of the Internet
On the Net we think we live we exist we love we look we play but ultimately we have found that what we like to do best is to argue.
The end.
Hey what do you know? I was just cleaning out my file system and I think I found the bottom half of Elle.
—
In conclusion, I leave you with this picture of a man holding a fish.
Things to ponder.
Nerdnarok 