A YouTube user named Andy Baio has collected a number of explanatory videos dating from the very dawn of the commercialized World Wide Web (roughly 1995 for our purposes here) and created a killer playlist featuring them. Here’s Baio on the group of videos:
 

A while back, I started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny, they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.I digitized the VHS tapes using a VCR connected to a MiniDV camera’s pass-through feature to my Macbook Pro. After I started putting these online, a couple more were sent to me, which I’ve included in the collection. And then my VCR broke.

 
As Baio writes of this delicious video, which dates from 1995, “Ripped from VHS, The Internet Show is an hour-long introduction to the mid-90s Internet from PBS Home Video, hosted by writers Gina Smith and John Levine.” It’s impossible for such videos not to appear hideously dated, but this program isn’t too horrible. Smith and Levine do a decent job walking newbies through the history of the Internet (ARPANET etc.) and some technical aspects no ordinary end user needs to know about (packet switching) as well as the nuts and bolts of writing an email and so forth. They bandy about a whole lot of scarcely familiar slang, such as “Internaut” (???) as well as well-nigh obsolete terminology like “cyberspace.” But you can hardly blame them for that. Pre-iPhone, pre-Facebook, pre-Google, pre-Netscape even, the Internet in 1995 seems awfully arcane to us today but in fact the essential components of the Internet were already present, including email, chat, newsgroups, spam, political activism, mapping programs, emoticons, and e-commerce—Smith and Levine touch on them all.

The general tone and the graphics and the clothing styles are purest mid-1990s, which is always amusing. One of the most surprising aspects of the video is that it’s shot not in Silicon Valley but in Texas, at Houston’s Rice University. At about 20 minutes in, there’s a nice Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference, which is all the better for the hosts not calling attention to it.
 

 
via ANIMAL

I’m very horny and looking for some good cybersex. Are you interested?

A woman sporting a Bill Cosby-ish sweater gives a handy tutorial on how to have cybersex on the Internet in 1997. She even touts, “We’ll also visit others who have mastered the art of one-handed typing.”

I like the inexplicable transition in the video where she’s wearing a brown shirt and then it suddenly disappears without explanation. She’s just happily typing topless, in belted mom jeans looking for a good time on the Internets.

 
via Nerdcore

 
Clever artsy “trash” spotted somewhere in Brooklyn.

Via New York Shitty and KFMW

 
The lovely Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing pointed me towards this incredible video of a mother/daughter team engaging in an Internet argument. Xeni writes on BB:

We should all be so lucky as to have our very own personal “Cindy” behind our shoulder, to support our internet arguments.

How does one go about finding a “Cindy”? I think I may need a YouTube wingman one of these days.
 

 
One little girl predicts finding a recipe on the Internet for “cat food cupcakes.” HOW did she know this?! 
 

 
Via KMFW

 
Amusing conversation from The Today Show between Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel discussing “What is the Internet?” back in 1994. Their faces look so perplexed and confused. Where the FOK was Al Gore? 

 
(via TDW)

Just when you think you’ve seen the far reaches of the Internet, well… you haven’t.

“Vore” art, which I discovered last night in one or another of the Internet’s putrescent stinkholes, is manga fetish art featuring animals eating people. Look, Internet otaku. FURRIES WERE BAD ENOUGH. Now this???

Good god, what’s the Internet going to look like after 20 more years of the fetish arms race?

From “Voreart”:

Vorarephilia is the fetish of being eaten, seeing someone else being eaten or eating someone. It’s all fantasy art. Nothing is or should be real.

You can find a lot of sexy art of this type on the web. This type of art will mix a variety of subjects together which makes it the most interesting type of sexy art out there. It’s sexy because you get a nice yin and yang mix of hot, sexy, gorgeous women all tangled up with slimy, very gooey, hungry monsters… a very delicious mix!

I have been a lurker for years and I finally needed an outlet. I am not much of an artist so I NEED these sites to keep producing wonderful vore art for my enjoyment. I support all websites that create excellent fantasy art. It’s a part of my life now and I really respect those who create this type of art. I needed a place to store my most favorite devouring pieces found over the internet because having it on my computer is just too risky. My family would just never understand this stuff unfortunately so must escape to my virtual world where I can be free! The goal of this site is to build more great art. I want to become the next hot vore extraordinaire! Keep in mind, this is only fantasy and imagination, I would get no satisfaction from any of this if it were real. That’s just really gross! I grabbed the above image from Voreville because I loved movie “The Beastmaster” the way it was originally. When they worked a sexy damsel into the scene I was so excited that I almost wet myself!

Girls snake feeding is my absolute favorite type of vore art. I love seeing that sexy silhouette wiggle inside the snake’s long body. Plant devourings is another favorite of mine. I enjoy it when venus flytraps capture sexy women and absorb them slowly. Spider wrappings is also very interesting. It’s more of an implied vore because spiders don’t really devour or swallow their prey whole. Sucking them dry is a nice way to imagine the act of eating. Mutant worm’s eating babes is great because it’s just like snake monsters eating girls, but it’s more slimy and sticky! There’s a few great sites that I go to ALL the time now and are a part of my daily routine. This is MY review of my most favorite erotic art sites.

(Voreart.com)

(Via Digg)

 
On this day 40 years ago, the very first e-mail message (long before they called it e-mail, of course) was sent by UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock over the ARPANET system from Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute, more than 400 miles away.

Kleinrock, while still a student at MIT, developed the principles of “packet switching,” which allows the basic data-transfer functions of the Internet. As a professor at UCLA, Kleinrock helped develop ARPANET, the interconnected computer network from which the Internet evolved. Today more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to the network.

What was that first momentous message, you may be wondering? It said simply “lo”—the message was meant to read “login,” but the computer crashed almost immediately.

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
It turns out that surfing the Internet is actually good for you! A new study released by UCLA indicates that cognitive functions improve, even for seniors, after a little as a single week of surfing the Internet, giving credence to the old adage, “Use it or lose it.” Amanda Gardner writes on Health Day News:

“You can teach an old brain new technology tricks,” said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, “we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain—which makes sense because, when you’re searching online, you’re making a lot of decisions,” he said. “It’s interactive.”

   —snip—

For the research, 24 neurologically normal adults, aged 55 to 78, were asked to surf the Internet while hooked up to an MRI machine. Before the study began, half the participants had used the Internet daily, and the other half had little experience with it.

After an initial MRI scan, the participants were instructed to do Internet searches for an hour on each of seven days in the next two weeks. They then returned to the clinic for more brain scans. “At baseline, those with prior Internet experience showed a much greater extent of brain activation,” Small said.

So forget all these studies that say the Internet is turning us all into attention-deficit info-snackers who skim rather than read. When you surf the Web, you’re not wasting time, you’re exercising your brain!

No word yet on what online gambling, porn and EBay addictions do for cognitive functioning.

Cross posting this at Brand X