This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Remember the good old days when the web created -- and then satisfied -- a taste for the time-wasting and the bizarre?
Wired revisits these most essential internet pioneers.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
A cut opening scene from the Sega Mega Drive game Zero Wing, featuring a bad translation from the original Japanese, was made into an animated gif with the dialogue: "Somebody set up us the bomb" and "All your base are belong to us". This spread hard and fast in 1999.
Mahir Çağrı's website won our hearts in 1999 with the words: "Who is want to come TURKEY I can invitate... She can stay my home...". It is not known if anyone accepted his offer: "I Kiss You".
Since 2011, a National Geographic clip, a high-camp voiceover from a New Yorker known as "Randall", and the species of Mellivora capensis combined to highlight nature's ultimate badass. Also: naaaaaasty.
Matt Harding can't dance. But in the five videos he has shot since 2005, he and his jiggle, set all around the world, form perhaps the first web meme to show such a joy.
The film Der Untergang is an account of Hitler's final days, ranting and stuck in his Berlin bunker. It's subtitled and one scene was rapidly reused to express -dismay at just about everything. Admittedly not nearly as funny if you can speak German.
10 more experts comment in our Web at 25 series...
The YouTubed video diaries of teenager Bree Avery started in June 2006. A hundred million views later, it was revealed to be fiction, starring Jessica Lee Rose, but it pioneered multi-strand online fictional universes.
The art of luring someone to click on a link that launches a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". It led to a revival, of sorts, of Astley's career, after about 18 million Americans were --reportedly rickrolled. Astley himself joined in when he rickrolled Macy's 2008 Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
There are many rules of the internet, but Rule 34 -- popularised by the inadvisable citizens of 4chan.org's /b/ community -- is both the wisest and truest. On the internet, rule 34 says, "There is porn of it. No exceptions."
More from Wired's Web at 25 series
- Tim Berners-Lee: the past, present and future
- Marc Andreessen: embed the internet
- Jimmy Wales: the developing world
- Mikko Hypponen: government surveillance
- Joi Ito: 'it's a living, evolving organism'
- Nigel Shadbolt: augmented intelligence
- Keren Elazari: biocomputing mechanisms
- Vint Cerf: internet of things
- Nick D'Aloisio: natural language
- Ze Frank: 8 things to expect next
- Arianna Huffington: the net grows up
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
