On the Web, probably Ate My Balls, Mahir, and Hello My Future Girlfriend.
I remember my dad when I was a little kid telling me about All Your Base. He thought it was really funny and I didn’t get it at all. My dad was a weird dude.
I actually had a brief exchange with Kibo. Sadly, I no longer remember the newsgroup or the topic. My first online experiences were either Compu$erve or Sierra Online. I’ve still got the Sierra games somewhere.
I remember this from around 1993 or so. http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/abort_retry_ignore.poem
Ham§ster Dance.
I’ll add another wiki link that’s useful for fixing my understanding of what these distinctions must be: Viral video.
The Good Times virus hoax.
Alert letter explaining that it was a hoax was dated 1995.
Ooh, and Zen and the Art of the Internet, does that count?
I came in to mention this. I remember being on AOL chat rooms when it was, like, AOL 2.0, and your account was charged by the minute. Whenever it got slow or boring, someone would start quoting the Monty Python spam sketch, which would get everyone joining in and sort of kickstart the conversation. Pretty soon, people were doing it to be annoying or to derail a chat, and “no spamming” rules had to be put into place. I can remember doing it myself, come to think of it. I’m sure that wasn’t the genesis of the idea, but I do remember feeling vaguely smug when “spam” entered the mainstream vocabulary.
Wonderful glance at the picture that far back! Thanks for sharing!
I saw my first Nigerian 419 scam via telex at work between 1988 and 1990.
The Neiman Marcus cookie recipe is the first email glurge I recall receiving, probably around the same time.
I recall the hamster dance as well. Seems like someone used it as an email sig the first few times I saw it.
The ones above I saw at work prior to having a home pc.
I heard the all your base are belong to us, but not until we bought a computer at home and I started gaming in the mid 90’s.
I remember Hampsterdance, Dancing Baby, and All Your Base as the earliest I experienced. That horrid baby came first though. The school folders with that likeness printed on it…shudder. I actually had an All Your Base t-shirt at one point. That one was the best of the early ones in my opinion.
What about Zombo.com? “Welcome…to zombocom!”
I stumbled upon Kibo, but way after the fact so I don’t think that counts.
(Slight hijack)
I had a horrible flashback to Hampster Dance the other day when my kids were watching Disney’s “Robin Hood.” I had never made the connection.
It was a meme by at least December of '99 and a Google search by date returns a “badger badger mushroom mushroom” YouTube comment on 8 July '98.
How did someone leave a YouTube comment 8 years before it was created?
That’s what Google says:
Thanks much for helping me relax on what bit of memory I still have going. I had been making excuses to myself of how after my “retirement” I stayed in touch in email with some work buddies and surely we swapped viral videos and suchlike.
I still can’t find anything to confirm dates on those clips (monkey and keyboard smasher) I mentioned early on. Once I can assure myself that those were things I saw on the internet at work, and not after I had to do my surfing from home, I can let the thing go. As it is, the blurring of things like this play tricks on my memory. I have trouble telling when I did stuff by a matter of years as it is.
YouTube was first launched in February of 2005. When I do the same search the first hit is a video on albinoblacksheep.com posted in may of 2005. The second hit is a YouTube video posted January of 2013. Searching on the phrase “amanita muscaria mushrooms (fly argic or soma)” yields this video, which was posted in 2006, but it does not contain any of the words after the ellipsis.
Where exactly did what you have in the quote box come from?
I quoted from the results of the Google date search that I mentioned earler. For badger badger badger mushroom.
But what website did it link to?
It’s for a YouTube favorites page. Something’s obviously wonky in those results.