One Hundred Years on the Web

Some people think that the internet is exciting. Most of those people think that web pages make up pretty much the whole internet. I think what I'm saying right now makes no sense at all.

In the last hundred years I've watched the internet grow from a weekly display of crop circles left by aliens and drunken farm boys to a place where any idiot with five minutes of free AOL access can post stupid reflections about the history of such-and-such. Frankly, there's too much crap out there nowadays. It was much simpler when you just had to look out your window at the wheat field once a week to see everything that was going on. Then you could spend the next few days mingling in the academic circles at the feed shop discussing the heuristics of it.

Here's a rough timeline as I remember it:

1899 Timeline began.
1900 I began my web page.
1901 The year after that.
1902 I can't remember what happened this year, but something important I think.
1905 Timeline skipped a couple years.
1906 James Joyce discovered that crop circles have meaning
1907 Religious leaders decided crop circles must be pornography.
1909 Scholars convinced United States Supreme Court that crop circles have artistic and academic value, lifting the ban on them.
1912 Farm boys in Iowa got drunk while their parents are at a local barn dance. As a consequence of a challenge to the elder boy's masculinity, the younger boy was forced to flee into the already-tall crops (legend says it was corn, but I remember it being marijuana) with the elder close on his heels with a scythe. The boys passed out amid their destruction, and blamed the damage on aliens.
1913 Farm boys in and around Iowa found getting drunk and making crop circles to be as much fun as cow tipping, and the practice spread.
1914 Aliens complained that the farm boys were not leaving enough untouched fields for extraterrestrial use. The farm boys mooned the aliens.
1915 Nothing at all happened this year.
1916 This was a boring year too.
1920 Followers of the Avatar Meher Baba postulated that, by ending leaflets with the word "Next," and an arrow pointing to the next leaflet, they could encourage people to read more than one leaflet.
1921 Still no one read Meher Baba leaflets. Baba followers tried drawing attention to their leaflets with bright text and crepe paper.
1925 I think there was Prohibition or something. I forget, exactly, because I'd been drinking the pure grain alchohol I'd been distilling in my bathroom for quite some time. Anyway, I hear that Prohibition gave people lots of time to work on their home pages. Purity of Essence!
1926 The leprechauns were abundant this year.
1927 The year 1927 came and went.
1929 Carrier pigeons began to replace crop circles as the top web platform.
1931 Erick Bryant, a Meher Baba follower, applied their practice of using the word "Next" with an arrow --now called Nextcrepe-- to carrier pigeons. They continued using crepe paper because of its weight.
1932 Peter Wemm, frustrated by the way Nextcrepe offered arrows to the next document without means to retrieve it, began tethering all the carrier pigeons to each other with string.
1934 His task complete, Peter announced the World Wide Wemm, and demonstrated its use. Reporters present wrote it up as the World Wide Web, having misheard Peter and made assumptions based on the appearence of the intertwined strings. No reporter ever bothered to confirm the name before printing and reprinting the story (which allowed them to print stories faster), thus establishing a standard practice of popular news media.
1935 Nextcrepe incorporated the string-based "link" technology into a common viewer.
1939 Organized crime discovered that they could tie photographs of scantily-clad women to net-worked pigeons, and charge people to look at them. The Legitimate Pigeon Watchers Society was born, and became the first profitable business based on the internet.
1941 The Japanese decided to enter the internet by stealing American pigeons and pigeon technology. America responded with battleships and aircraft carriers.
1945 Japan regretted having tried pigeon technology and vowed revenge in automobiles or electronics.
1946 Writing this timeline got boring.
1947 I decided to skip ahead a few years.
1951 Aliens abandoned crop circles entirely after deciding that Earth held no intelligent life. Earth residents' intergalactic reputation as "fun to toy with, good at making cheeseburgers" dropped to "makers of the vile 'veggie burger' swiftly." Extraterrestrial involvment with the web portion of the internet ceased, though they continued to receive spam.
1960 Everyone spent the next ten years doing drugs and, thus, had no motivation to work on their home pages.
1970 Following the death of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the hippies all realized that it was time for them to grow up and get jobs. Nothing else of consequence happened for a decade.
1980 In a cheap Animal House ripoff, a long-since-forgotten character used "this is the 80s, man!" as an argument to justify his over-styled hair and flipped-up collar. The argument made sense to everyone at the time.
1981 The hippies actually got jobs.
1982 Knight Industries put a computer in a Pontiac Trans Am. The world began to see the possibilities of computers for information interchange as driver Michael Knight was able to travel from location to location simply by hitting a "Next" or "Back" button on his car's console. Everyone also saw the import of blinking lights, as lights on the dash and nose assembly gave the computer car greater credibility.
1983 The hippies became the most money-grubbing, ruthless, labor-oppressing, and environmentally destructive generation since the Robber Barons. One major difference was that Carnegie eventually developed a conscience but the hippies never did.
1984 Precocious young people built a supercomputer by wiring together circuit boards available at Radio Shack, adding LEDs, and hooking in a robotic arm. Americans learned that, with the aid of computers, you can create beautiful women, gain access to any other computer, take over the world, and became popular. Geeks everywhere flocked to computers.
1986 Rock star Falco decides to tell the world "rock me Amadeus!"
1987 To combat the problem of "broken links," where the string attached to the "next" carrier pigeon frays and comes apart, internet architects replaced the string with cable. They also used cats with teeth and claws removed to retrieve pigeons for reincorporation into the net work. One particular cat retrieved the most birds (more than half), so the internet architects decided to name the cable type after him. Several newspapers announced the honor and described how much Cat-V had surpassed his comrades Cat-VI, Cat-IV, Cat-III, and so on.
1989 Lightning struck the cable, simultaneously inspiring the brightest minds on the internet to use electricity (in the form of computers) to carry the net work of information, and producing a need for them to do so because all the carrier pigeons died.
1990 Net shirts, pastels, and day-glow colors suddenly became unfashionable. People began wearing pants thirty sizes too large belted to their knees.
1994 A small company was able to translate Nextcrepe technology and a related viewer, or "browser," for use in the new computer-based format. For copyright reasons they called themselves Netscape.
1995 As an act of revenge, the Japanese inundated the internet with pictures of naked schoolgirls and pokemon drawings.
1996 A large company became jealous that Netscape allowed people using all different kinds of computers to "browse" the Web (as people came to call it). This posed a problem for that company because neither did this company own the Web, nor did the Web force people to use this company's products. They quickly produced software called "Internet Exploder," whose purpose was to make the whole internet only work when using this company's products. Internet Exploder also followed the company's general software design guidelines that all software should be slow, resource-intensive, and crash a lot to prevent people from learning how to use computers (because doing so would mean being able to stop using this company's products).
1997 Satan refused to exchange the souls of the top Internet Exploder executives for control of the internet. "Do not come to me until you have a soul to sell!" the Prince of Darkness reportedly roared at them.
1998 I moved my web site from crop circles to GeoCities. I never did trust carrier pigeons.
1999 Popular news media decided to incite a riot for the next New Year's Eve, having run out of other news. They spent the whole year speculating wildly about what would explode, how many people would die, and what form the anarchy would take. Rational people shook their heads. Everyone else bought rations.
19100 A few servers and web pages had problems dealing with dates after 1999. I managed to get on local television because the skulking cowards snuck up on me while I was searching for the bottom of a pint of Guinness. I wound up their "y2k" teaser clip. I have yet to exercise my right as an American and sue everyone involved.
19101 We technology experts fixed all the problems with dates after the year 1999.
19102 The internet denizens united to make "the new year," which was a novel concept involving throwing confetti at each other somewhere between December 31 and January 1. CNN also invented a fake war to generate traffic to its website. Before long, other "news" agencies like Yahoo!News, c|net, and Reuters decided to join the conspiracy for ratings.

For logistical reasons I had to leave a good deal out, like the details of the battle between Netscape and Internet Exploder in which courts repeatedly chastized Exploder for lying and cheating. I also had to leave out the 1963 plague of electricity mites because, on reflection, it just didn't seem related. Wherever possible I linked to sites supporting the facts I've presented.


@ -------------------------------------------------------- @

Index * Links * Gripes * Downloads * "Words, words, words."

This page hosted by GeoCities Get your own Free Home Page