How I Invented the Internet

It was a rough day at the pentagon that day. The president and his group of advisors were haggard and tired and finally the leading German-sounding scientist of the day “Hans-Grueberman” Slammed his hand down on the desk.

“Gentlemen! Zere’s goht to be a better way!” he shouted germanically.

The President slowly turned to him and rolled his eyes “NO Duh” He sneered, earning himself a time-out.

The Fleet Admiral present at the meeting, was silent until this point. But he made his voice heard.

“We need a way to get pictures of naked women to every person in America, some to canada and almost nothing to communist china!” He shouted.

We all nodded, he was right. We’d been working for weeks on a top secret project involving linking computers together for world-wide benefit. The year was 1973 and the head of the Top Secret Project, code-named “Interweb” Al Gore stepped to the forefront.

“Why don’t we just hook them all together with wires?” He ventured.

A dawning realization passed around the room in a palpable wave. Our collective lightbulbs lit up.

The Admiral was the first to speak, “Of COURSE! WIRES!” and he fed Al Gore a cookie.

Al Gore, a young buck of 86 years old in 1973 was of course right. We tried putting the computers right next to each other and yelling at them, we even tried seducing the information out of one machine and into the other with the most attractive USA Pin-up girls available at that time. We even tried throwing the data from one computer to another. It wasn’t until the advent of running a wire between two machines that we were able to successfully make an Internet.

Upon the advent of the first internet the world waited for the 100 baud connection to slowly transfer a postage-stamp sized photo of a womans breast from one room to the next. When it was done, there were two digital breasts, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. Never again would a young boy sit in his fathers den playing with his gun and reading his old tax forms and have no pornography to watch instead. Never again would obscure fetishists be unable to connect with the world at large because of their inordinate love toward farm animals. And Never again would Asian people suck at video games.

But it wasn’t all “Peaches and Semen” as my Grandmother used to say, after her lobotomy. There was still work to be done. From one room to another was fine, but we needed a way to get breasts to every home in America and some of the public libraries. Unfortunately the public libraries still use the first internet to this day and were never updated when people realized they could just look at naked people and not read. But I digress…

Hans-Christian-Grueberman the twin brother of the german scientist earlier mentioned in this story, spoke up. Quixotically he spoke in a heavy Jamaican accent and I’m not making any of this up.

“Yah mon! Thas jus tha beginnin’! We cahnt rest on our bottoms now But don’ we be needing saft-ware and TCP-IP settin’s” He lit his hash pipe again and waited for a reply.

Dead silence ensued, and finally the President replied, slowly at first and then more firmly.

“Well I think I speak for us all, when I say, that we didn’t understand a single fucking word of THAT… But that we DO need software and protocols for this internet, am I right?”

Strangely enough, he was right. And while I’m guessing with no research that the president at the time was Gerald Ford, we’ll call him “President Spanky” for the duration of the educational story. But this dear readers, is where I played my part. Everyone started yelling and screaming to figure out how to hire engineers and scientists to make software for systems that didn’t exist yet, when I stepped into the center of the room and said quietly.

“I know what I have to do”

Everyone stopped talking all at once and not wanting to miss my chance, I followed up.

“There’s no way anyone is smart enough to do all the stuff we need to do, so there’s only one solution, one way we can make this happen”

They knew I was right, the entire group leaned forward as I uttered my next words.

“We must call upon the power of Satan himself” I said in bold text

A collective gasp created a brief vortex in the middle of the room so that everyones important documents briefly flew into the air and coincidentally spelled the words “Deus Ex Machina” in the air before falling back exactly where they were before in neat little piles. We all knew it was a sign, we would have to pull out all the stops on this one.

President spanky quickly drew an expert pentagram on the ground, and the scientists laid out skulls and candles that they brought along, just in case. The Admiral himself handed me a Satanic bible, and Al Gore gurgled happily to himself in his “rockin’ chair” then we made ready to contact the Dark Lord. There was a lot to do. But before we even started, there was a huge flash of green light, directly in the middle of our pentagram and a deep booming laugh. When the smoke cleared half the room was covered in a thick layer of black dust, several of the members of the cabinet were dead and there was something in the center of the pentagram.

It was strangely untouched, pristine, despite the carnage all around it. It was a little plastic disk about 3.5 inches square and it read “AOL .001” with a swooping blue logo above it that looked like a pyramid farting on itself. I carefully picked it up and held it in my hand. So small, the whole big internet was here and it was in my hand.

President Spanky was the first to regain focus, he quickly asked me,

“Did you do that?”

I knew I hadn’t done anything at all so I replied

“Yup, that was me”

The president stared at me with a mixture of awe and disbelief on his face and said

“You just invented the Internet”

I nodded sagely, looked him in the eye and said “I know, I wrote this story”

That’s how I invented the Internet.