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Many of you reading this article right now can't imagine a world before the Internet. Either you were too young, or the Web has entangled itself so completely into your everyday life that the very wiring of your brain has adjusted accordingly.
But the world hasn't changed as much as we think. In fact, many of the things we think of as being unique to the Internet generation pre-date it by decades. #8.
Emoticons
Here's something that has to have originated in online culture, right? Nothing symbolizes the "lazily use as few keystrokes as possible" culture of the email/text message generation like combining punctuation to convey human emotions.
Actually Been Around Since... The first emoticon showed up nearly 120 years ago, when author Ambrose Bierce wrote his essay "For Brevity and Clarity" and proposed a new type of punctuation mark to convey jest, which he knew would make the satire a little more clear in typewritten correspondence where he proposed, say, killing a hobo with a bag of doorknobs. The new punctuation took the form of a horizontal parenthesis, which was meant to look like a smile, sort of like a written laugh track to cue readers in on all the jokes.
Bierce's eyeless horror-smile never caught on, but other versions continued to turn up in places like the personal telegraphs of Abraham Lincoln. Then the most uncanny example of old-timey smileys comes from 1881 when a satirical magazine called Puck--sort of like Ye Olde Cracked.com, presumably with 19th century dick jokes--published its own list of "humorous typographical faces" for use in telegraphs.
#7.
LOLcats
A couple of years ago, around 78 percent of Internet bandwidth was made up of pictures of cats superimposed with broken English captions. Perhaps you've seen one or two.
Combining the two things the Web loves the most--cats and badly misspelled words--made for the perfect Internet meme. Something only Web-surfing teens could have invented, right? Actually Been Around Since... Well, you're only off by about a century. It was in the early 1900s when Harry Whittier Frees started working on his animal postcards for The Rotograph Company of New York. What did he come up with? This:
Note the words near the bottom. Yep, it was cats in hilarious poses, with kitty dialogue superimposed. LOLcats of the Teddy Roosevelt era. Back in those days, picture postcards were fairly recent developments and Frees's animal models were filling the public's need for adorable animal cruelty. Frees experimented like hell with his cats and dogs, playing around with different settings, costumes and props and restraining the animals in their poses. Hilarity ensued! Well, sort of.
#6.
Cartoon Porn
Many of you can probably pinpoint the exact moment your childhood innocence died: right around the time someone showed you extremely detailed drawings of April O'Neil getting plowed by a Ninja Turtle, who then was blown by Krang. That person then pointed out that you were looking at an entire website full of nothing but cartoon porn. A vast website. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a simpler time before such depravity, when people didn't actually masturbate to pictures of Marge Simpson going down on Sailor Moon? Actually Been Around Since... You know, back when they masturbated to this instead?
Yes, to escape pornographic spoofs of famous characters you would have to set the Way-Back Machine to before the 1920s when there were no Tijuana Bibles; the racist-tastic name given to an eight-page underground porno comic book found all throughout America up until about the 1960s. They often featured famous cartoon creations like Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Little Orphan Annie filling each other out like a service questionnaire at Outback Steakhouse. And we're not talking about boring, edited-for-television sex. We're talking about butthole-lancing graphic pornography, sometimes with a sprinkle of bestiality.
Typically, Tijuana Bibles were sold "under the counter" (a phrase which here means "out of the backs of station wagons or from oversized overcoat pockets") at garages, barber shops and even schoolyards, because nothing develops young minds quite like an image of Popeye bashing through a wooden door with his erect cock. #5.
Twitter
Twitter is surely the clearest and most pathetic sign of the downfall of our civilization. It's a damning byproduct of an attention-deficit, egocentric and aimless population, with millions of us reporting that we went to see Paranormal Activity movie and that it was "totally creepy lol!"
Honestly, at what other point in history could we have felt the need to log our everyday activities in 140 characters or less? Actually Been Around Since... Well, if Twitter is a sign that we're all shallow and vapid, then we've been going down that road for a long, long time. Check out some of the ancient wall writings discovered at Pompeii. Sure, you've got the normal graffiti--the kind about various individuals' less-than-immaculate reputations and where they can be reached "for a good time." But you also find a ton of people who stopped to scrawl reports of whatever random, pedestrian activity they were involved in. For example, one guy wrote the date he made a loaf of bread. Another guy detailed his laundry list.
They were Tweeting. Posting the ancient equivalent of all the "at the mall" and "this guy in front of me totally just farted" messages that dominate Twitter on a daily basis. Back then, graffiti was used to pass gossip around the city, letting people know what everyone else was up to. And as these brief "tweets" were often replaced with new entries, a simple stroll down any Roman street kept you up to speed with everything that was happening with your friends and neighbors, same as visiting their Twitter pages.
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xdr, you're on cracked.com... chill. you're here for entertainment, you're not actually watching the discovery channel. nobody cares if you're right or not.
You're wrong! I'm from Croatia which was part of the Eastern Europe in those days (It's actually Central so get your data right!) and really dandy thing was that piracy was legit! We had those transmission on radio Belgrade (I think?) which isn't pirate radio but a major one (can't say commercial because nobody had any profit back then).
You're wrong! I'm from Croatia which was part of the Eastern Europe in those days (It's actually Central so get your data right!) and really dandy thing was that piracy was legit! We had those transmission on radio Belgrade (I think?) which isn't pirate radio but a major one (can't say commercial because nobody had any profit back then).
Recently, I found an age-gap site called __Agegapmingle.com__ It's a nice place for Younger Women and Older Men, or Older Women and Younger Men, to interact with each other. Age gap is not problem there. You may check out or tell your friends.
"we're pretty sure half the crap you're listening to in iTunes while you read this article was downloaded from Bit Torrent" lol, half? Also, CRACKED.COM is stuped.
You write, "If you were a kid in Eastern Europe or Brazil after 1982 (we're going to go ahead and assume that's exactly none of you, at all, that are reading this article right now)". Well, actually I was born in 1981, but in the GDR. Here, programs and games in BASICODE were officially aired on our youth radio "DT64". BASICODE was sort of a "universal basic" where compatible interpreters existed for several computers and where the audio coding of the binary data was readable by all of them, be it a KC85 (GDR computer), ZX Spectrum or Atari XL. There were even vinyl records with software on sale since our GDR computers used a standard DIN plug for audio in where you could not only plug in a cassette player, but everything which produces an audio signal. Unfortunately I got my first computer in 1990 shortly after the fall of the Wall, which was an Atari 130XE, so I could never try it myself.
Bah! Of course in Poland I recorded games for my ZX Spectrum (rubber buttons!) from the radio. You could also go to a "local weekend software market", usually located in a school (winter) or a park (summer), buy an audio tape and have the games of your choice recorded on the spot. For less money than you could imagine. But... when you loaded the game nobody could move around the room, because very often you needed 20 minutes of loading (screeee screee shoooooo screeeee hrrrrrrr....) to see the menu screen (and music... voooo veeee beeeep). And if the audio head was not perfectly set (with a tiny screwdriver) or was shaken (train, bus, father walking in) you had to start all over. Silent Hunter was my nemesis back then... :)
Loved the twitter! But don't you think that Kim Kardashian was a little bit too eloquent?
And in fact, I was a kid in Eastern Europe after 1982. In fact, waaay after 1982, born in '88, but my country (as former part of a socialist block and generally being a s**thole) was always ten years back in the schedule - I experienced this stone-age-file-sharing s**t first hand.
Hey I was a kid in Brazil after 1982. I was born in 1983! Never heard of the tapes, though... Gonna check with some older nerds...
I loved the pic from the movie 'Hackers' - I watched that the other day on a VHS... weird coincidence?!?! (don't worry, I think I'm a dork, too. You shouldn't feel alone in that.)
I LOLed at the China man screaming, "GTA 4!!! Disc 2!!! 001101..." Hahahaha good one Cracked. #1 doesn't surprise me; humans have a need to share--it's engraved in us. Since we were young boys, our parents always taught us to share our toys with other boys...*cough*...
Hey everyone, shut up. They found water on the moon.
@ondonaflash - haha was thinking of the same thing as I was reading it B-).... also u could include the stupid ass chain emails of the "forward this to 15 of your friends or u'll grow a giant hemorrhoid" fame. apparently ppl would get _handwritten letters_ with similar crap and would actually _copy them several times over in handwriting_ and drop the copies off in other random(?) mailboxes.
"I have not buggered men" would be a much more shocking revelation in ancient Rome (or any large city now days).
I can't read #5 without thinking about that scene from Life of Brian where the soldier makes him right "Romans Go Home" in Latin 100 times.
Good article, but I do have something to add about the Black Faxes. Back in the days before reasonably-affordable laser or inkjet printers, most fax machines used printing on a thermal paper roll (like most receipts you get these days). Therefore it was the length that determined costs, not the amount of printing required. So what you'd do is fax people a toilet roll! At the receiving end the fax would use a whole roll of thermal paper printing nothing, rendering it inoperable as there was nothing for any subsequent fax to print on. It can still be done today, of course, but it's not as relevant as most faxes have large memories to store docs if the paper runs out or are virtual servers with - for all intents and purposes - an infinite memory. Just make sure you remove the header from the sending machine, unlike a colleague of mine who forgot and was almost fired.
Good article, but I do have something to add about the Black Faxes. Back in the days before reasonably-affordable laser or inkjet printers, most fax machines used printing on a thermal paper roll (like most receipts you get these days). Therefore it was the length that determined costs, not the amount of printing required. So what you'd do is fax people a toilet roll! At the receiving end the fax would use a whole roll of thermal paper printing nothing, rendering it inoperable as there was nothing for any subsequent fax to print on. It can still be done today, of course, but it's not as relevant as most faxes have large memories to store docs if the paper runs out or are virtual servers with - for all intents and purposes - an infinite memory. Just make sure you remove the header from the sending machine, unlike a colleague of mine who forgot and was almost fired.
I find it shocking that in this message board, there are more posts of people that lived their childhood in 1980's Brazil than posts of "CRACED.COM is stuped."
Though I like your attitude even so.
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