Internet History

ARPANET, Usenet and the Great Renaming, BBSes, Gopher, IRC, MUDs, GeoCities, webrings, Eternal September.

ELIZA and the ELIZA effect, PARRY, SHRDLU, A.L.I.C.E., SmarterChild, the Loebner Prize, the AI winters — what these systems actually did versus what was reported.

The Mother of All Demos, Amiga cracktros, ANSI/ASCII art, the Utah teapot, Lenna, fractals, Winamp skins.

Sensorama, the Sword of Damocles, VPL, Virtuality pods, the Virtual Boy, CAVEs, Habitat, VRML.

Authored horror fiction of the internet, ARGs, and analog horror. House rule: fiction is labelled with its author and first-publication date, or the post does not stand.

Find it, date it, source it, in any language. The largest lost-media event on record has no English documentation at all: Baidu Tieba hid fourteen years of the biggest Chinese-language forum in a single day.

2channel and 洒落怖, netto-roa (ネットロア), Kisaragi Station, Kunekune, Hasshaku-sama, DCInside, Tieba, Pontianak and Aswang. Provenance stated where known and left open where it is not.

FAST channels, creator portals and the routes a back catalogue takes to a mainstream catalogue — how independent work actually reaches an audience.

First uses, spread, dead-meme archaeology — and the enforcement record, from Griner v. King to Grumpy Cat.

Link rot, archive.org practice, what is already gone, and how to cite a capture properly.