An anniversary for great justice: Remembering "All Your Base" 20 years later:
As the Internet began crystallizing into its modern form—one that now arguably buttresses society as we know it—its anthropology of common language and references matured at a strange rate. But between the simple initialisms that emerged by the '90s (ROFL!) and the modern world's ecosystem of easily shared multimedia, a patchwork connection of users and sites had to figure out how to establish a base of shared references.
In some ways, the Internet as we know it really began on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago today, when a three-word phrase blew up: "All Your Base."
On that day, a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com, one of the Internet's earliest and longest-lasting dumping grounds of Flash multimedia content, and went on to become one of the most beloved Internet videos of the 21st century. Though Flash support has since been scrapped across the entire Web-browsing ecosystem, Newgrounds continues to host the original video in a safe Flash emulator, if you'd like to see it as originally built instead of flipping through dozens of YouTube rips.
In an online world where users were previously drawn to the likes of the Hamster Dance, exactly how the heck did this absurdity become one of the Internet's first bona fide memes?
A dub(?) of the intro sequence is available on overclocked.org as a .mov file.
YouTube video which starts with actual scenes and then runs wild with the meme. (Has a catchy, techno soundtrack, too!)
Obligatory: xkcd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @03:55PM (11 children)
Another classic of the early Web:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3_t2HDFM4nQ [youtube.com]
The music makes me wish I had a pair of JNCO jeans so I could dance to it proper. Eh, the legs would probably be tight now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:04PM
An artifact from a time before Lowtax became a ruined drunkard lolcow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:06PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:39PM (6 children)
"The early web" lol
You're obviously too young to remember the true early web. All your base was early Youtube at best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:43PM (5 children)
No dingus, I am not too young. The truth is that it has been over 25 years since mass Internet (Web) adoption by the public, and you are quibbling over a few years in your definition of "early web".
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:47PM (2 children)
Any article that tries to make the case that “ In some ways, the Internet as we know it really began on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago today,” is striving mightily and obviously to push a false proposition (aka click bait) and I sure as hell won’t read it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @06:02PM (1 child)
To put a "round" number on it, I'd say 1995 is closer to mass adoption.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Friday February 19 2021, @02:23AM
September 1993.
Never forget.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @09:56PM (1 child)
There was lots of interesting stuff going on even more the Eternal September.
BBS culture in particular is one thing I'm genuinely nostalgic for since it had the cool stuff of the internet - games, file sharing, shitposting, and so on. But way better since it was all local. So you had a lot more common interests, more civility, and for some reason lots of women of dubious values had an affinity for BBS'.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Friday February 19 2021, @01:23PM
Don't forget UUCP [wikipedia.org] - the peer-to-peer beginnings of the internet. File sharing, email, and bang paths.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @08:08PM (1 child)
And how could we forget this from around the same time...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6CDFn2i3I [youtube.com]
An ear worm that will infect you like the Covid Nouvelle...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 18 2021, @11:23PM
More like an ear badger, ouch!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:15PM (12 children)
The author of the article seems too young to have been there.
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us" was a funny meme, but Hot Grits, Goatse.cx, and others preceded it. Slashdot was a major springboard for all of them at that time.
Acronyms like ROFL arose variously on chat engines or early cell phones, which were not connected to the web and for whom every character sent in a text message cost money. Before the Web came along, on the early BBSes, people were typing "AFK" and "TTYL" and "IMHO."
In other words, most of those practices were developed at the very beginning by geeks and nerds. It's only now, 30 years later, that the rate of technological adoption and lower barriers to entry (the technical know-how required, cost of equipment, etc) have intersected such that the average person can get in on the jokes.
It should be pointed out, also, that the practice of creating memes was not limited to the people who were online. AdBusters had a whole magazine devoted to parodying consumer culture with subversive memes [formes-vives.org].
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:40PM (4 children)
You said that you paid by the character for SMS messages. That was never the case that I saw. Billing was always a flat fee per SMS message. The shorthand arose not to save money, but out of the usual desire for efficiency, esp. since the early cell phones had no keyboard, and it could take up to 3 or 4 error-prone keypresses on the same number key to generate a single character. On computers hooked up to the Internet, simple speed of typing even on a regular keyboard was I believe the impetus for the shorthand. Faster to read, too.
HTH
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:46PM
Cellphones in those days had small screens too, do it made sense to keep everything basic.
(Score: 2) by jb on Friday February 19 2021, @03:03AM
Not here either. The per-character thing is much older and hails from the days of telegrams (which were billed by the character pretty much everywhere) and to a certain extent also telexes (which were billed by the second [at 50bps, 6N2] in some parts of the world).
Those media had their own language of shared abbreviations, quite different to the ones that sprang up much later online.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 19 2021, @03:28AM
Not by the character per se, but some systems charged by the MB, which amounts to the same thing.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:17PM
My carrier it was per SMS, but there was a max limit of characters per message--120 characters if I recall correctly. This is also why Twitter had a 120 character limit originally. T9 text entry on the phone was a second reason you used shorter phrases--though many of the common phrases were already use in chatrooms and chat clients.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:43PM
my undernet irc place is empty.
it's a bit sad.
i remember the times when I talked to people with a lag of 40 mins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gznork26 on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:54PM (3 children)
Seems to me that acronyms such as ROFL had spread across SF fandom's mimeographed APA's (Amateur press Associations) by the early 80s. I participated in the Los Angeles Science Fiction and Fantasy Association's crowdsourced and crowd-assembled publication, APA-L back then. Some of the other early acronyms were:
ROFLMAO - Rolling on the floor laughing my a$$ off
RAEBNC - Read and enjoyed but no comment (which was the precursor to 'like')
I have some issues around here somewhere.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 19 2021, @03:33AM (2 children)
APA-L (yeah, I've got a boxful here somewhere) and various other faanish publications. I first saw them in N3F round-robins ca. 1980. Followed naturally from the repetitive nature of group commenting, methinks.
My personal fave was LSHTTRDML. ;)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Friday February 19 2021, @06:31AM (1 child)
Okay, I'm stumped. What does it stand for?
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 19 2021, @07:26AM
Laughed So Hard The Tears Ran Down My Leg
:D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @07:16PM
I know what you are saying. As someone who has been on the "net" since the late 80s, I say to the author, bring me a glass of water, Junior. It has been downhill ever since Gore pushed to open the Internet up to commercial interests in the 90s. Places like Slashdot were successful because they were essentially usenet with a graphical UI (and moderation), but alas everything decays to the mediocrity inflicted by maximum entropy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @07:20PM
... all existed by the time of MUDs, IRC, Usenet, and were prevalent on AOL/IRC in the early 90s (although generally most of them were seen as 'low brow' shorthand until pager/cell phone text messaging usage made them prevalent.)
Very little of the lingo used in internet culture originally came from internet culture, although much of it was expanded into variants over time (like the comprehensive smiley charts, or the japanese emojis.. the early japanese emojis were mostly ASCII punctuation characters, followed later by the emojis utilizing kanji when utf-8 made them available everywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:21PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeyEGebJ1l4 [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:33PM (5 children)
But it was still 10x better internet than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tiktok. At least it was clean stupid, not mass-surveillance kind of stupid.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:45PM (1 child)
It was silly. It was pointless. On the upside, it plainly knew it was silly and pointless. Sort of like other artifacts of that age, like French Erotic Film [youtube.com] (safe for work, it's not what it says it is). And it was abundantly clear that it was the work of amateurs who were goofing off more than anything else.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @04:51PM
The "monetizers" moved in after the frontier was cleared by the pioneers. The usual problems of society showed up in cyberspace (remember that term?) as the carpetbaggers (the moneygrubbing tribe) showed up and greed was unleashed upon the users. It was fun while it lasted.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday February 18 2021, @07:07PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:25PM
Hmm... Maybe it's time for me to update my sig. This article reminds me it's almost old enough to drink.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @07:32PM
The internet died about the same time MAD Magazine did. People no longer recognize their their lives have become a mere parody, painful to look at. For example, influencers and their followers. As stupid in their own right as QAnon and their followers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:03PM
Alas it has been DMCAed everywhere that I looked.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:09PM
...belong to crazy:
https://archive.org/download/TerryADavis_TempleOS_Archive/videos/2017/2017-07-12T04:47:05+00:00%20-%2008JewishPig.MP4 [archive.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:16PM (4 children)
The hover text on the xkcd cartoon says that the "All Your Base" retro return should take place in "AD 2021"... now, was this updated recently or has Randall built another time machine?
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by carguy on Thursday February 18 2021, @05:33PM
Unless these folks https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/286:_All_Your_Base [explainxkcd.com] are in on the joke, it looks like that was the original mouse-over text.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday February 18 2021, @07:32PM (2 children)
No, that's just about the usual typical cultural cycle...
It doesn't matter if you're talking about bright neon clothes or bellbottom pants or all your base "memes"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @11:46PM
My bell bottom jeans have been in and out of style a couple of times by now...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @02:51AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dRBWyf6z8 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:30AM
It was originally "All your butts are belong to us."
-Tim Cook, Apple CEO
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:55AM (1 child)
Actually back then it was called: U.C.E. (spam was usenet only, U.C.E. == unsolicited commercial email). Back when spam filtering was still in its infancy (around 1995) you'd get scam emails that were written by people who had no handle on the English language all the time. Lots of them were so badly written they were funny. "All your base are belong to us!" was a spam, and the guy who sent it pounded the crap out of mail servers all across the Internet with it. Pretty much everybody on the net got dozens (if not hundreds) of copies of it. It became an office slang. Kindof a funny sarcastic way of saying "I win you loose!".
Anyway, yeah. It all started with some fruit loop trying to scam people into sending money to Korea or something. I don't remember where. I do remember the pestulent bastards emails showing up in my inbox every day for like two weeks. I imagine some other folks here remember the emails. I only vaguely remember it, because it was mostly just an irritant at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 21 2021, @08:25PM
It is a quote from the Engrish translation of the intro of the Japanese video game Zero Wing.