The internet has catapulted from infancy to teenage hood in just a scant twenty or so years. This article is the first of many to delve into the people, cultures, fads, and technology that has shaped the binary super highway.

Like the real world, fame and fortune often accompany the golden rule of popular culture; you get your fifteen and fade away.

Today we will be looking at the tip of the iceberg of cyber phenomenon. Exploring some of the most classic memes on the net, these treasures be they video games, words, music, or any other number of mediums showcase the fact that just as much as the internet has shaped our culture, we've shaped it too.

As with any medium where people are able to connect with each other, humor happens. Rumors spawn. Urban Myths are born.

Before the flash and java intensive world of today, computers lacked a great depth of being able to display pictures and colors correctly. Words were used more often, with the picture only used as a companion piece. Jump to 2009's current "i can Has Cheeseburger?" lolcat craze and the humor is now decidedly more centered on the picture, the text just a companion piece.

Understandably, many of the early forms of internet humor while well written were rather technologic and geek specific.

Most average users wouldn't know where to begin in some instances in what some people were talking about, and this served in part to help bury the jokes of internet past.

My favorite written internet meme would have to be The Bastard Operator from Hell, a comical look at Simon who is a Systems Operator (you may call him an 'IT guy.') in various capacities at various locations in his career.

BOFH was well written, with tongue-in-cheek humor and hijinks worthy of The Office. People died. People lives were ruined. Some were put in wheel chairs.

Here's an excerpt of the very first chapter:

"It's backup day today so I'm pissed off. Being the BOFH, however, does have it's advantages. I reassign null to be the tape device - it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to keep getting up to change tapes every 5 minutes. And it speeds up backups too, so it can't be all bad can it? Of course not.

A user rings

"Do you know why the system is slow?" they ask

"It's probably something to do with..." I look up today's excuse ".. clock speed"

Simon was good at what he did. So good, his biggest challenge was finding ways not to work. For example, when he mentions reassigning "null" to the tape backup device (Tapes were used many moons ago instead of optical or memory chip storage. It was cheap, easy to pull off, but a pain to use because much like watching a tape in the VCR you have to fast forward or rewind to find the programs or information you want to offload). In affect, while the system was busy backing it's self up in theory, in practice it was dumping said backup into nowhere. No one would know, because the computer would tell them that it had made its backup as scheduled.

The success of the BOFH has lead to several books and still enjoys prominence on the Register, a UK website geared towards IT users and computer hobbyists.

The greatest source of text propagation, however, was e-mail until fairly recently...

Long before Africa's cheif export was scam letters, viagra was freely available, and people were happy with the current size of their members, there existed a much more innocent version of communication which had jumped the borders from real world stamps to binary bins.

The chain letter at one point seemed to be as viral as 2001's Code Red worm. Many a chain letter arrived in my mailbox via less savvy family members. Its a touchy subject to try and explain to your grandmother that what the letter says really isn't true.

The most prolific fact at that time presenting it's self in a chain letter? Why, congress is going to start charging for e-mail! Or some variation there of.

This idea was actually partially validated in 2006 where AOL was trying to create a "certified" e-mail system. They weren't trying to impose a fee everytime someone sent or received an e-mail, however. The point of the system was actually to create a "white list" of commercial senders of e-mail. The theory behind the idea was that a commercial mass e-mailer may pay about one quarter of a penny each message.

The intention was not to charge the actual users, but to have paying commercial customers to bypass filters and go straight to a users in-box. However, this service was to actually decrease the likelihood of spam and other unwarrented messages by putting the sender on a "white list" of sorts. If complaints rose from customers receiving information they didn't ask for, however, the commercial sender would run a risk of being black listed, never to send e-mail to another AOL customer again.

This scheme was just one of many various chain letters. In fact the number of different letter permutations eventually lead to a website that has become some-what of a knowledge source for them, called Snopes.com. A cursory glance at this website seems to show hundreds of thousands of rumors and urban legends that at one time or another may have found themselves in your inbox.

 Of course, as we know the internet now, there is video clips all over that propagate some form of culture in-joke.

But every internet fade doesn't have to have a paritcular humor to it. Before there was Flckr, MySpace profiles, and Flash enabled slide shows there was ...

Hot or Not.

HotorNot.com first rose to promenince in 2000. In the United States it was one of the first websites to offer a place to put your mug on the internet to help you boost your self esteem as random people rated your vanity.

In fact, the success of the website lead the creator to put together a service based on the website. Its basic goal was to "connect" other members for love interests and badly planned shotgun weddings.

While not as full featured as some other dating services (lacking video conferencing, audio communication, etc.) it was sold in 2006 for $20 million dollars. Hot or Not still enjoys a nice variety of users and visitors every month, adding a "HOTlist" of items that people rate as well. For instance, over 67,000 people at the time of this writing agree that the Fox television series Family Guy is decidedly hot.

Perhaps another popular internet service doesn't quite exactly belong here. But a cartoon that it spawned certainly does. Many will recall a little program titled Napster. From 1999 to an eventual platue of popularity in 2001, the original Napster fell apart amidst court battles until it was sold off to a firm in 2002 while under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The service had established file trading in the eyes of the public. Before its inception, the other alternatives for filesharing were less streamlined and difficult for the less computer literate to use.

Napster tore down that wall, cementing the practice and betterment of technology to decrease the complexity of sharing music. BitTorrent, the most widely used technology to trade files today makes downloading whole discogaphries attainable in just a few clicks and a launch of a program.

While the practice of file sharing is not new, the emergence of a critical mass in usability has invariable lead to multiple law suits from copyright holders. But the first widely lauded attempt at taking illegal file swappers to court came into vogue when the band Metallica made waves and noise against the practice.

Sparks flew for and against Metallica's stance against Napster, and as any good capitalist would do, a flash animation website called Camp Chaos created a series of satyrical cartoons featuring the drummer Lars Ulrich of Metallica, as well as its front man and guitarist James Hetfield.

To this day Camp Chaos still hosts the videos on their site, and most can be found simply at YouTube. Hate letters from Metallica fans still ensue.

Some of these internet memes have very real world roots. Behind many urban legends there is usually one or two grains of truth to be found. But as can be seen in the rise of animal videos and Chuck Norris jokes not all internet fades has to have a sensical beginning.

The most interesting case of all is All Your Base Are Belong to Us.

The story behind its beginning is long, though ultimately it boils down to bad english translation on the part of a Japanese video game publisher. Zero Wing, a title that was centered around the Japanese demographic and poorly translated in a rush for a European launch found its way on the MegaDrive and into the short history of the internet.

All Your Base is unique in that it was one of the first large spread phenomenon to encompass all mediums for the sake of nonsense. A flash animation was created, starting out with the beginning offending cut scene and tapering off into a synthy bass track. The music video then began to show various digital altered pictures that featured familiar brands, advertisements, and landmarks reading All Your Base Are Belong to Us!

If that wasn't enough, a parody of Hot Or Not was launched called "All Your Base Or Not," showcasing new pictures with the by now monolithic statement. Even to this day, those who are familiar with the phonomenon will recite its mantra, for the love of justice and great zig.

These pop cult internet sensations owe their success to both the creators, their audience, and the old world media occasionally showcasing them in news segments and articles.

Our facination with marrying entertainment with technology has had mixed results. Today with the rise of YouTube, flash-based video, inexpensive webcams, ever larger hard drives with ever lower prices, and high bandwitdh connections assure that the next big thing to enter our collective conscious is just around the corner. Waiting to enter the history books.

The next article in this series will center around the world of ANSI and ASCII art and the evolution of flash animation.