WHAT IS

April 1, 2013 6:47 PM

What is the Internet anyway? What is Internet, anyway? What is the Internet? What is the Internet, really?

BONUS SHOW PLUG: Well if it's OK with the HAWK!

posted by mysticreferee (11 comments total)

Speaking of all this sort of thing I recommend the Youtube nominations for best video ever, happening live now.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:59 PM on April 1, 2013 [2 favorites]

3rd video has my most deeply hated video editing trope: Words appearing on the screen set to the sound of typing of a keyboard out of sync with the letters.
posted by hellojed at 7:05 PM on April 1, 2013

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posted by Sys Rq at 7:40 PM on April 1, 2013 [3 favorites]

The day I started to feel old was six years ago, when young master flabdablet, all of sixteen, asked me what my favourite Internet game was when I was a kid.

But I don't mind feeling old since taking an opportunity to remind young miss flabdablet (15), in a discussion about the inevitable collapse of Facebook, that only two years ago was MSN Messenger still a thing. Watching her face as she dredged her former relationship with that service out of the memory hole was just priceless.
posted by flabdablet at 8:58 PM on April 1, 2013

it's a series of tubes
posted by the_bone at 9:47 PM on April 1, 2013

I have a very hazy (yet vivid) memory of being shown a video in my 7th grade homeroom that announced the arrival of The Internet.

The video was billed like a historic event and was announced several days (maybe even weeks) in advance. Leading up to it we had discussions in class about just what the internet was and how it was going to revolutionize everything and everyone.

The video itself was several minutes long (and for the longest time I thought it featured Anna Paquin, but it turns out that was just an old MCI commercial) and it was shown simultaneously to every classroom in the school, AND prefaced by an introduction from the principal OVER THE INTERCOM. It felt truly momentous, even though at the time I cynically dismissed the whole idea as a passing fad.


Sent from my iPhone
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 10:12 PM on April 1, 2013 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: Boom! New page.
posted by salishsea at 11:17 PM on April 1, 2013

I absolutely love videos like this. They make me feel old, but they also make me feel fortunate to be apart of the beginnings of such a life-changing (and world-changing) technology.

Also, I just realized something: if my Yahoo e-mail address were a person it would be graduating high school right about now.
posted by littlesq at 11:25 PM on April 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

Well, I'm confused. EPIC 2014 is now no more than a year off and googlezon.com is still just parked. Somebody's dropping the ball here.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:24 AM on April 2, 2013

Also, I just realized something: if my Yahoo e-mail address were a person it would be graduating high school right about now.

I checked the census data against my first email address (AOL, hey-o!), and it turns out that [e-mail] was older than about 85 million US citizens at the time that I finally had it taken behind the barn and executed for being a totally compromised spam-trap.
posted by FatherDagon at 9:11 AM on April 2, 2013

How the Internet works, from PyCon this year.

(yes, other things happened at PyCon this year, like a whole conference of good talks like this one)
posted by ubernostrum at 12:51 PM on April 2, 2013