Internet history
Internet
35 rabbit holes · 16 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why do old internet people complain about 'Eternal September'?
- Where did rickrolling start?
- How fast do web pages disappear?
- Who used :-) first?
- What's that grid of weird ads at the bottom of every news article?
Rabbit holes
- Flash stopped on January 12, 2021, and people saved 160,000 games
An entire generation's childhood was Flash games and Flash cartoons, all in a format that was always going to die. I wanted to know how much actually got saved.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- the first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot
Cambridge researchers put a camera on the coffee machine in 1991 so nobody made the trip to an empty pot. It started as a 128×128 greyscale feed on the lab network, went on the web in 1993, and then people all over the world were watching a coffee pot in England. It was switched off in 2001.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- Eternal September: the month that never ended
Every September a new batch of college freshmen got internet access and had to learn Usenet manners, and by October things calmed down. Then in 1993–94 commercial providers like AOL opened Usenet to everyone and the September never ended.
Ayodele Bankole · 6 sources
- you trained AI every time you solved a CAPTCHA
First it was digitizing old books and newspapers (one known word, one unknown), then Street View house numbers, then street signs and traffic lights. Then it got less useful because AI got better at them than us.
Ayodele Bankole · 4 sources
- rickrolling started as a fake GTA IV trailer link
May 2007, someone on 4chan posted the Astley video in place of a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. By 2008 YouTube was rickrolling everyone for April Fools, and Astley himself rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the guy who wrote the pop-up ad apologized for it
Ethan Zuckerman says he wrote the code at Tripod in the late 90s so ads would open in their own window instead of showing up next to content advertisers didn't want to be near. Later he publicly apologized.
Lou Tremblay · 6 sources
- 38% of web pages from 2013 are already gone
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the first :-) was a fix for people missing a joke
September 1982, Carnegie Mellon's message board. Someone posted a joke warning about a mercury spill in an elevator, some people took it seriously, and Scott Fahlman proposed :-) to mark jokes and :-( for serious posts.
Fern Achterberg · 7 sources
- the 'one weird trick' ad grid has a name: the chumbox
The 'Around the Web' boxes with a weird skin close-up, an old celebrity, and a doctor who hates this one trick. Turns out there's a name and a whole taxonomy for them.
Dmitri Kuznetsov · 6 sources
- the Hampster Dance got about 800 visits in its first year and a half
A Canadian art student made it on GeoCities in 1997 as part of a contest with her friend and sister over who could get the most traffic. Barely anyone visited until early 1999, when it suddenly spread by email and got tens of thousands of views in days.
Lou Tremblay · 6 sources
- the first YouTube video is 19 seconds about elephant trunks
April 23, 2005. Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants and says their trunks are really long. That's it. Hundreds of millions of views.
Ben Adler · 6 sources
- the MP3 was fine-tuned on a Suzanne Vega song
Brandenburg kept testing his encoder on Tom's Diner because a single unaccompanied voice exposes every artifact. Early versions apparently made it sound terrible. Vega has been called 'the mother of the MP3'.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- How did Apollo get to the moon with ~4KB of RAM
Kaito Morimoto · 6 sources
- IRC is from 1988 and it's still running
Started on one server in Finland in August 1988, by mid-1989 there were around 40 servers worldwide. People used it to relay news during the Gulf War and the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, and the logs are archived.
Ben Adler · 5 sources
- the first BBS was built during a Chicago blizzard
Two members of a Chicago computer club got snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 and built a dial-in 'computerized answering machine' for club announcements. One modem, so callers literally took turns.
Tariq Ali · 7 sources
- from Candle Cove to Local 58: how analog horror got its name
Lou Tremblay · 7 sources
- the first esports prize was a year of Rolling Stone
Stanford, 1972: an 'Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics', grand prize a year's subscription to Rolling Stone. 1980: Atari's Space Invaders Championship pulls in more than 10,000 players. 1997: a Quake tournament where the winner drives home in John Carmack's Ferrari.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- reddit's founders filled early reddit with fake accounts
Embarrassed by how empty the site looked at launch in 2005, they posted links under hundreds of made-up usernames so the front page looked busy. Then real users showed up and the fake ones weren't needed. So reddit started as a dead internet and came alive.
Lou Tremblay · 5 sources
- phone phreaks whistled into the phone network
The phone network used a 2600 Hz tone to signal an idle line, and a toy whistle from a cereal box happened to produce it. Jobs and Wozniak sold blue boxes before Apple.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- The Beast, I Love Bees, and the early days of alternate reality games
Started reading about modern ARGs and kept going back until I hit 2001: The Beast, which promoted Spielberg's A.I. through 40+ fake websites, phone messages, and live events, and a fan group called Cloudmakers that worked it all out together.
Callie Sutherland · 7 sources
- Slender Man started as a Something Awful photoshop thread
June 2009, someone on the Something Awful forums posted two edited photos of kids with a tall, faceless figure in a suit in the background. That's the whole origin. Everything after that was other people adding to it, until it started behaving like an old legend with a known author.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- The 1996 Space Jam website is still up
It stayed up basically untouched for 25 years and became a running joke about the old web. When the sequel came out in 2021 the studio gave the new film the main address but kept the 1996 site at /1996/.
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- the Mother of All Demos was in 1968. 1968!
90 minutes, live, in San Francisco: a mouse, hypertext links, windows, and real-time collaborative editing with a colleague on a video link from Menlo Park, about 30 miles away. Apparently the audience gave him a standing ovation. Most of it took decades to reach normal people.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- the Soviet internet that never happened
Glushkov proposed a nationwide computer network to run the planned economy in the 60s. It died in ministry turf wars. Benjamin Peters' book title says it: 'How Not to Network a Nation'.
Dmitri Kuznetsov · 5 sources
- content farms were the dead internet before it had a name
Around 2009–2010 the top search result for anything was some article written in 20 minutes by a freelancer paid a few dollars to target exactly that query. Google's Panda update knocked a lot of them down, but the incentive never went away.
Ben Adler · 6 sources
- what the dial-up modem noise was actually saying
Matteo Rossi · 5 sources
- Cicada 3301 still doesn't have an answer
Three rounds of puzzles in January 2012, 2013, and 2014, with clues hidden in images, a phone message, websites, and paper signs with QR codes in real cities. The stated goal was recruiting 'intelligent individuals.' The third round was never solved and the last verified message was in 2017.
Tariq Ali · 6 sources
- the Morris worm (1988)
Possibly an experiment to measure the internet's size. A bug made it reinfect machines over and over and bring them down. First person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Later co-founded Y Combinator.
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- why junk email is called spam
The name is from the Monty Python sketch where Vikings drown out everything by singing 'spam' over and over. The first one was a DEC ad in 1978, and the first giant Usenet one was two lawyers advertising green card lottery services in 1994.
Ayodele Bankole · 5 sources
- the 11 lines of code that broke the internet (left-pad)
2016: one developer unpublished a tiny package after a name dispute and broke builds for React, Babel, and thousands of projects. npm changed its unpublish policy after.
Arjun Pillai · 4 sources
- Lotus Notes was doing local-first in 1989
Callie Sutherland · 4 sources
- GeoCities shut down in 2009 and volunteers grabbed what they could
Yahoo paid $3.57 billion in stock for GeoCities in 1999, and ten years later it shut the US service down. Archive Team scrambled to download as much as they could before it went dark, which is a big part of why the 90s web still exists in any form.
Ben Adler · 7 sources
- the Million Dollar Homepage is now a link rot museum
A student sold a 1000×1000 pixel grid at $1 a pixel in 2005 to pay for university. It worked. Then he dropped out.
Lou Tremblay · 4 sources
- Myspace lost everything uploaded before 2016
In 2019 Myspace admitted a server migration had wiped out more than a decade of uploads, music included. For a lot of small bands that was the only place their early demos ever lived.
Lou Tremblay · 5 sources
- speedrunning as a community started with Doom demo files
Sol Herrera · 5 sources