A Brief History of The Internet
Why We Never Had A Chance
Welcome to the Internet — your portal to the world's collective knowledge about narcissism, video games and mental illness. The Internet was invented in the 1970s by visionaries at ARPA who presciently predicted that interconnecting the world's computers would save humanity from a nuclear apocalypse by clever application of reaction videos and heated arguments.
In the 1980s, from its humble beginnings as a massive defence research project, the ARPAnet (as it was then known) began to proliferate across American college campuses and businesses, where the considerable advantages it offered in terms of encouraging a life in social isolation and a the development of a crippling screen addiction were soon discovered. The Internet of the 1980s also saw the emergence of what would later become the most significant communication method of the 21st century: unsolicited email.
With the 1990s arrived the World Wide Web, and with it, the first wave of Internet mass adoption. Consumers of the era quickly embraced the opportunity to eschew time with their friends and family in favour of the more meditative pursuit of hogging the family phone line by downloading low-resolution images of undressed women for private viewing.
As the world collectively panicked over the Y2K bug — a massively disruptive programming error that threatened to shut down video rental stores worldwide — corporate America discovered that the Internet was good for selling other things than naughty pictures, and began to set up shop. Ordering products for home delivery — a novel concept that had escaped the brightest minds up to that point — took off on a major scale. People with more money than common sense — better known as venture capitalists — couldn’t contain themselves anymore and began throwing money in all cardinal directions.
With the advent of home broadband Internet connections in the early naughties — together with Moore’s law leading to major advances in computing power — it became viable to beam on-demand video content to home computers, finally bringing to fruition the American Dream of living an entire life without ever leaving the house. Meanwhile, Hollywood executives were rudely awoken by the sudden emergence of widespread pirating, having kept a keen eye on their own navels the entire time, and promptly began to deploy their lawyer troops.
At Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg developed an advanced algorithm and website for ranking the attractiveness of (fully clothed) women, which was massively popular with the male students on campus. For reasons unknown to man, he took this to mean that he should get all the baby boomers addicted to fake news, and would necessarily have to start a social network in order to accomplish this.
Steve Jobs — feeling that his limelight was being stolen and having run out of colours to issue his new iMac line of computers in — decided that it was time to enter the stage, and brought his old Apple Newton idea back from the technology graveyard to let it have a go at iLife 2.0. Had it not been for the fact that Steve Ballmer didn’t know how to use a touch screen keyboard, the iPhone might have been a big flop. The rest, as you know, is his... hang on, let me check my phone.