Potted Meat & the Bad Guys

If you're less than 4 decades old, you probably don't remember a world where spam didn't come in an email. Way back then, spam only appeared in a can, or in a Monty Python sketch.

This year, the Internet turned 40. Can you believe it? It's true. The Internet was born in 1969. Very few of us can remember a time when there was no Internet. Of course, given everything else that we were up to in 1969, it's a minor miracle that we can remember anything at all.

But that's another story.

Imagine it. 40 years ago, in a secret government lab underneath Al Gore's house, the very first digital message was sent from one computer to another. Of course, it had a typo. And the second computer never received the message, because it bounced, rejected as spam.

Nevertheless, history had been made. Within the hour, eight-year-old Barack "Barry" Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Computer Science, and Joe "Joe" Biden had leaked the lab's location to the press. Later that afternoon, a government clerk named Elwood Pangorn became the first person in history to be fired for surfing the web during business hours.

Legend tells us that this first-ever message was a simple transmission of a simple phrase: "LO." Of course, legend also tells us that foul, vicious blood-sucking creatures, undead ghouls who take whatever they want from everyone they encounter, once roamed the mountains of Transylvania, and the icy cubicles of the IRS. But that's another story.

According to my exhaustive research, while microwaving a spam-filled Hot-Pocket, the first internet message ever sent was this: "Please forward this joke to eight other people, as soon as we invent six more computers. LOL!"

These days, it's hard to comprehend what life was like before the Internet. We had to manually search for information and knowledge by reading buks, or bukes, or books, or whatever they used to call those little rectangular things. To communicate with our neighbors, friends and family, we had to use the telephone, or in extreme cases, actually stand in front of them and talk. Frightening idea, huh?

To circulate a petition, we had to don white wigs, hop on a horse, and gallop around at midnight, yelling our message of solidarity until we got shot by the enemy or, equally likely, by our own side. We actually had to use envelopes and stamps to share pictures of clothing-challenged Scandinavian women with a severe hormone imbalance.

Spam was canned meat, a virus was a cold, a worm was bait, and "Trojan" was a word you rarely heard uttered within 2 miles of a fundamentalist church.

Nobody had ever heard of carpal tunnel. It was practically impossible for deposed third-world dictators to contact you, offering to transfer their "entirely fortune" to your "bankness" account, in return for one, good, solid English grammar lesson. Google was the surname of a cartoon character. And LOL was either a typo or a secret government program underneath Al Gore's house.

Was it a better time? Or worse? I'm not sure. I'll google it and post the results on YouInnerTube.

Initially, the Internet was a military project, conjured during the paranoid days of the Cold War, created so that if there ever was a global thermonuclear war, we would still be able to receive irritating calls cajoling us to switch long distance companies. Unfortunately, nefarious agents from the Worldwide Communist Threat (The Bad Guys) co-opted the technology, and proceeded to make us interminably stupid, step by step, simply by getting us to send each other the same joke about 418 schlocktillion times.

Seems to be working.

It was late in 1990 when the very first public web page was created. By some counts, there are now so many web pages that it would take the average interminably stupid person 31,000 years to stare at every single page for 1 minute, and somebody that reads this is gonna try it, and I'm pretty sure that I once worked for that guy.

And now, LOL and Behold, the World Wide Web is practically indispensible. We have things like Facebook, which is some kind of mind-altering drug (probably created by The Bad Guys in 1969). Facebook makes people share stuff like "I'm going to bed now" and "r u bored? me 2! LOL!" and "I'm almost ready to prepare to begin getting ready to leave work." And then there's Twitter, with its brutal 140-character limit that causes people to post shorthand-y stuff like this: "Must! #stategov #allthat @LeLe @nochance bit.ly/GvwSeK - So much 4 u! LOL."

I'm pretty sure I worked with that guy, too.

Of course, the Internet would never have made it past the white-board stage without the computer itself. So let's take a quick moment to acknowledge those visionaries, those hardy pioneers: IBM, who invented the first personal computer (the PC); Apple, who invented the first cool computer (the Mac); and Microsoft, who invented the memory leak (the Loud Swearing).

The Internet. Overall, it's an amazing history. In 1972, there were only 2,000 humans online (oddly enough, all named Elwood). This year, over 1.6 billion of us are out there, sending the same two jokes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Moreover, for those long weekends, we now have 31,000 years of available reading. And, perhaps most amazing of all, the Internet has been around for forty years now, and Congress still hasn't figured out how to tax it.

31,000 years. Better get busy. And when you're done, America will still be in debt.

But that's another story. LOL.