Rick roll is hardly early internet.
Source, im old
Yeah, but goatse isn’t very wholesome. Let the kid believe :P
You’re the man now dog?
Dancing baby?
Hell there were viral things before Google existed.
Goatse is the definition of some hole, tub girl on the other hand…
No, but it is hole-some.
Star wars kid, daft punk hands, daft punk girls, ninja kid there are tons of earlier internet memes.
I forgot about daft punk hands. Wow.
Badger badger badger was always fun. So was End of ze world.
And even those are pretty late memes.
I second this comment. I am old too. 🤣
I think all your base is pretty wholesome :3
I mean, TAKE OFF EVERY ZIG!! 🥰
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Even that one wasn’t that early. That was like 2000/2001 or something like that. I remember listening to the mp3 of the song on my drive to college.
Actually it was found that Rick roll was originally inspired by an old Internet video dated back to the late 70s. They did a research on that if you’re interested.
I got an ad before the video, ffs. My day is ruined.
Knew what “a research” was linking to, but I clicked it anyway.
Ope, link preview coming in clutch.
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You spoiled the surprise
Hey, not everyone has the ID memorised… I’m not one of them, but still
Why, when I saw my first decapitation video I was merely a boy!
2007 wasn’t early internet lol.
Early internet’s most famous meme was probably either hamster dance or dancing baby. All Your Base wasn’t long after.
I mean there were even fax machine “memes”. Checkout Faxlore if you weren’t around at the time.
Thank you, I had forgotten some of the memes and jokes from that era.
That toaster cat shitting rainbows!
Edit or the beep beep frog with the schlong
Edit edit: guess that last one was a whole video…not a meme
Nyan Cat
That’s quite recent still tho
See the edit edit edit edit…
Re: peanut butter jelly time - my 8 year old picked it up somewhere along the way and is one of his favorite songs now.
Between All Your Base Are Belong To Us and Peanut Butter Jelly Time, you guys are giving me a trip down memory lane! Or down CanIHazCheezburger and Shoop Da Whoops (although those are more recent, I believe)
I miss the days of looping flash videos. The Badger Song, The Llama Song, Magical Trevor, etc. Those defined my childhood.
Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers mushroom mushroom
Here’s a llama, there’s a llama and another little llama
Okay, have a nap.
THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES
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even this is pretty late-stage flash content. We must go deeper.
Nuhuh.
True early internet meme was pics from Madonna’s coffee table book. Iykyk.
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Ron Livingston playing piano as a cat.
He was imitating this video which went viral before his.
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Youtube isn’t the early internet friend.
Going off the comments, did we all just get trolled hard?
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An early meme in a more modern format is this one.
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Just for a bit of context I was “surfing the internet” in 1994 via Gopher, an early alternative to the web as we know it now and I used it primarily to find and download apps stored on computers connected to the internet.
In 1995 I was using the Mosaic browser and later Netscape to surf the World Wide Web mostly via webrings that were individual webpages that had links to other wepages of similar content linked to them.
I don’t recall and am not aware of anything that would resemble a meme from that time? This is a year or so before Dancing Baby which is usually considered the first viral video and even then that was originally shared via email forwards.
Usenet was absolutely swarming with memes. They were text-based rather than image-based but they were definitely memes.
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This is the moment to mention that Rick Astley still makes music and just released a new song, it’s called Never gonna stop. I’m not kidding, also, it’s a banger.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Rick Astley is an amazing vocalist, for real. I’ve heard some of his more recent stuff, and it’s very good.
With that being said, I’m still not clicking that link
Dancing baby is the early internet meme.
I hate that baby!
Lol dude what the fuck? That is not early Internet. That’s a good decade and a half past early Internet.
My spoon is too big
That was not early internet.
Hah. “early internet.” Just like how Video Games’ first foray into existence was in 2003 with Knights of the Old Republic. Before then, nothing existed.
“You wouldn’t get this from any other guy” is less wholesome and more incel, TBF.
Memes are as old as humanity, so Internet memes are as old as the Internet, starting ca. 1993.
Yep. Really comes down to how you want to define “internet meme” – memes do not need a visual.
One of the oldest memes I can think of is the term spam. It dates back to Usenet.
I thought that was a monty python bit?
It was, but in its sense of flooding with unwelcome online content, it was a Usenet meme first. Goes back to the green card spammers.
I remember a different internet. I thought the most viral stuff was a guy shoving a glass jar into his ass which then broke. And we all nervously laughed as he pulled glass out of his now pissing bloody sphincter. Or two girls puking and shitting into a cup which they drink. Or cake farts. Lemon parties. Goatse. Or just ddos random sites something something fire some space lazer ion cannon thing occupy!
Or meat spinning
Oh, you spin me right round
What about the memes that South Park made fun of years ago?
Star Wars kid
Dramatic look gopher
Tron guy
Etc.
