Older Than They Think / Web Original

In General

• Some would think Wikipedia was the first wiki site. The term originates with the Portland Pattern Repository, and several other wikis, including everything.com and h2g2 (based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), also predated the better-known encyclopedia.
• Uncyclopedia has a running gag about Kitten Huffing. Ween mentioned inhaling kitties in a song (Marble Tulip Juicy Tree) in 1989!
  • Also mentioned in a 1996 Father Ted episode; a man was allergic to cats, and inhaled kittens to punish himself for his sins.
• The Internet itself is older than most people think. Most people would not have heard of it before the mid-1990s, and thus assume that was roughly the time it came about. The World Wide Web dates from 1991, but it is actually just one of many applications built on top of the actual Internet. Unfortunately, an exact date for the birth of the Internet cannot be given, since it was a continuous development over several decades. Some years which may be considered candidates for this include:
  • 1968, When Arpanet was started
  • 1969, When the first message ever was sent via Arpanet
  • 1974, When the technical core concepts of the Internet were formulated at Stanford University
  • 1981, When the Internet Protocol version 4, which is dominant to this day, was introduced
    • For that matter, the Internet itself can basically be seen as "Telegraph 2.0" with a visual display.
    • The PLATO computer system was developed at the University of Illinois in 1960 and used on college campuses, military bases and some businesses until the early 80s. It was a teaching tool, but its most lasting legacy was its community, made possible by its extensive communication facility. It had chatrooms, one-on-one chat, email, discussion groups and many games. Disney Interactives' VP Bill Roper started as a PLATO user.
• If you are part of the Millennial generation, there is a good chance that you never saw a computer until you entered primary school in the mid-nineties, even though personal computers were around for a decade before that (and computers in general are far older), so you likely believed that they were invented around that time before you were told otherwise.
• Based on comments on YouTube on the Max Headroom Incident, you'd think that the idea of trolling on the internet is only about 15 years old and that the internet was invented around 1994 (see above for details). Truth is, it dates back to the late 80s at the very least, but back then it was an initiation process for newbies where someone would ask a question everyone knew the answer to for purpose of weeding out the newbies and only the newbies would answer, it was called "trolling for newbies". Snopes is someone who participated in this early form of trolling. However, the direct ancestor to what's known as trolling today dates back even further, to at least the late 70s, but until the term "trolling" evolved, these people were known as "griefers". Evidence of this behaviour can be found as early as 1981 on Google Groups archives of Usenet.
• The Virtual Youtuber craze lasted long before characters like Kizuna AI and Kaguya Luna became well known for it. Nico Nico Douga users used to (and still do) use Visual Novel-style 2D avatars when they wanted to do a Let's Play or make informative videos,^note making them also older than the 2D VTuber platform Nijianji though they would often use text-to-speech software in place of their own voice.
• Poe's Law is named after Nathan Poe, who posted on a Christian forum site in 2005 discussing the difficulty in distinguishing parody/satire of religious discussion written in text format from sincere beliefs. However, the idea that parody/satire in text format on The Internet can easily be mistaken for sincere beliefs existed long before 2005, with Jerry Schwarz commenting on the phenomenon as early as 1983 on Usenet.
  Nathan Poe: (in 2005) Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.
  Jerry Schwarz: (in 1983) Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks. Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.
• Social media in general existed as early as 1979 with Usenet being the earliest social media application in existence.
• A Metaverse of connected virtual worlds run by different owners is currently being conceived and designed by companies who think they're pioneers in something that has never been done. Open Simulator has done it as early as 2008 when it introduced the Hypergrid. Nowadays, the Hypergrid connects several thousand big and small grids, at least 95% of all OpenSim grids. Also, the term "metaverse" has been used in OpenSim circles before 2010 already. Not to mention that it was invented in The '90s by Neal Stephenson for his novel Snow Crash and not by Mark Zuckerberg two decades later.

Site-specific Examples

• Cracked loves this.
  • The Internet culture... well, 8 Online Fads You Didn't Know Were Invented Decades Ago summed things up better than we do.
  • This is on top of all the articles about old technologies that Cracked has run.
  • 6 Forms of Modern Depravity (Way Older Than Your Grandpa) shows late medieval Scottish rap battles, Japanese Edo period celebrity culture associated with the Kardashians, the Furry Fandom in ancient Rome, medieval Catholic acceptance of gay marriage, and late medieval treehuggers in India.
  • 4 'Internet Things' That Are Older Than You Thought shows early fanfiction, Tijuana Bibles (basically early Rule 34) and Play By Mail (a precursor to online gaming).
• The Nigerian Prince scam goes back at least as far as the 16th century. It was called the Spanish Prisoner scam back then and sent out through regular mail, but everything else is exactly the same.
• In-universe (or possibly lampshaded) example. The Nostalgia Critic did a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he acted out all of it like he did in his review of the original Transformers Live-Action Adaptation. That first review was the basis for the later character of Chester A. Bum. At the end of the second review, Chester A. Bum leaned into frame and said, "Dude, did he just steal my act?"
  • Possible actual example: during his Animaniacs tribute, the Critic appears to attribute The Smurfette Principle to The Nostalgia Chick. TV Tropes had an article on the topic long before she touched it, and we didn't invent it out of whole cloth either.
  • The Critic didn't actually coin the phrase "You know, for kids!", which he says whenever something suggestive or disturbing happens in a kids' movie. It's a quote from The Hudsucker Proxy.
    • Even Linkara of Atop the Fourth Wall fame made this mistake and apologised in his Amazones' Attack Prolouge and several other of his early videos for using "the Critic's" joke.
  • One of the Critic's most beloved gags, the Bat Credit Card from Batman & Robin which is an absolute Rant-Inducing Slight for the guy, was actually done five years earlier in Batman: The Animated Series: In "Two-Face, Part 2", Harvey actually has an ATM card, complete with the name Two-Face printed on it, after he's been disfigured and turned to a life of crime.
• Possibly the example with the shortest amount of time, Lanipator had to put up a disclaimer that he did not steal the "Neighborhood Watch" joke from Naruto: The Abridged Series. In fact, he used it first, and Naruto Abridged used it as a homage to him. Which should be obvious, considering the neighborhood watch van is clearly from Yu Yu Hakusho (given its art and color style)
• Thuddingly literal example: almost any comedy video on YouTube that references current pop culture will have comments added years later about how the reference is so dated or played out, in the delusion that all videos they haven't seen yet must be new. Direct parodies seem to suffer from this most heavily.
• Many people that hear the Microsoft Sam voice being used for anything instantly associate it with Master Chief of the Arby 'n' the Chief series. This voice, along with Mike and various other text-to-speech voices, were used mostly in Flash movies made by the Clock Crew of Newgrounds.
• Long before the internet-famous LongCat, there was a similarly long Siamese cat in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus eating Killer Cars and normal buildings (would that make it a Tacgnol Esemais?).
• Rule 34 was around before the Internet. By several decades, even.
• Rule 63 was around before Internet Explorer. The main character in the video game Faria, which came out in 1989, has been seen as a gender swapped version of Adol from the video game Ys multiple times.
• Some YouTube commenters think that DeceasedCrab was the first person to ever do a Let's Play. While DC was one of the first to put video LPs on YouTube, he wasn't the first LPer by a long shot.
• Retro gaming video review shows were nothing new when The Angry Video Game Nerd debuted back in 2004. Classic Game Room had been doing so for 5 years! Yes, from 1999, back in the 20th century!
• Youtube Poop was preceded by some of the YTMND fads (for an example, You Forgot Poland) which featured random pictures, lots of Sensory Abuse and became more elaborate as the time went by.
  • Interestingly, an Ur-Example of Youtube Poop can be found in Daffy Duck in Hollywood, a 1938 short in which Daffy edits a film reel to produce this.
• The Hampsterdance music was originally from Disney's Robin Hood (1973), laugh and all.
• The earliest confirmed use of the acronym "OMG" was in a 1917 letter by a British admiral, according to the Oxford dictionary.
• In Echo Chamber's seventh episode, Dana comments that Walk and Talk is "like The West Wing", prompting Tom to reply that no, Kenneth Branagh did it first.
• While the trollface meme as we know it did indeed begin with the famous comic, the facial expression itself of the squinted eyes and the smile turned up at a corner is a trademark of Ernest P. Worrell. It took off in the context of trolls from the movie Ernest Scared Stupid, in which Ernest makes the face while teasing an actual troll, but it isn't always used when he's trying to annoy someone, and it predates the comic.
• Shit Pickle and Super Ultra Mecha Death Christ 2000 first appeared in an animated short film by James Rolfe called The Wizard of Oz 3: Dorothy Goes to Hell. However, they're usually thought of as characters from The Angry Video Game Nerd, where they made cameo appearances.
• If you say the word "trope" outside of TV Tropes, you may get attacked by TV Tropes' hatedom or just assumed to be a troper.
  • On the flip side, good trope names are often pre-existing terms, some of them ancient.
  • Roger Ebert made lists of tropes similar to TV Tropes, usually for snark purposes.
  • Anton Chekhov himself wrote a short story listing cliches. I Was Quite a Looker, Impoverished Patrician, Old Retainer...
• The @ symbol has existed since at least the 1300s, albeit its usage as "at" probably began in the 20th century.
• Sadly, neither this 4chan board nor omegle created the line, "hi, welcome to stealth". That right goes to Bad Religion with their song "Stealth" off of their album Recipe for Hate made in 1993.
• SCP-173 is a statue that moves when you aren't looking at it and tries to kill you. It's easy to assume that the Foundation found a Weeping Angel...but, as the FAQ points out, the entry was submitted a few months before that episode aired. Ironically, the reverse became true after the rediscovery of the original SCP-173 entry: it turns out the Weeping Angels made their first appearance thirteen days before SCP-173 did.
• Matt and Pat of Two Best Friends Play turned the phrase "Do you know how many [object] I have to [verb]? More than you'd think, and less than you'd hope," (and its many, many variations) into a Running Gag. They first used it in their Soul Calibur V video, which they uploaded on February 26, 2012. In a July 2013 video of a Deadly Premonition playthrough, they noticed that one of the characters in the game says, "I know more than you'd think, but less than you'd hope." Deadly Premonition was released in 2010. Matt and Pat were flabbergasted to realize they'd been unwittingly copying DP that whole time.
• Doomworld is often claimed to be the oldest unofficial Doom news site. In fact, DoomGate arrived in 1994, not long after the game itself, and is still running today, albeit no longer updated; Doomworld wasn't launched until 1998.
• Many people think that Jonathan Paula and Jory Caron invented the microwave show genre with "Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This?" in July of 2007, but there are older microwaves shows on YouTube such as microwavecam (who began in April 2006), dOvetastic (March 2006), and quite a few others, including those that predate YouTube. Brainiac was doing "Cooking with Microwaves" on British television in 2003! Two years before YouTube was even created! And Mythbusters also has been doing experiments with microwaves for a long time.
  • dOvetastic began posting his videos to YouTube in March of 2006, but he has been hosting his show on the internet for much longer than that, beginning in 1991, which would also make it the first web series, two years before the average person would even have the internet in their homes. The origins of his show also go back to 1979.
  • Captain Microwave (Microwave Me Show) began doing microwave science experiments back in 1992 but only discovered that there was an audience for it in summer of 2012, leading him to creating his own YouTube microwave series. Originally just to draw people to his music channel.
  • Jon and Jory also freely admit that they did not pioneer the microwave show concept; they got the idea from other shows (specifically dOvetastic's and microwavecam). Jon also hates when his fans harass the creators of other microwave shows, even apologizing for his "dumbass fans" in one notable instance.
• Most people would think that the idea of sex in furry stories is about as old as cartoons are. This is not exactly true. There has been a portrayal of sex in most medieval Dutch animal fables like Reynard the Fox. The oldest ones date from the 11th or 12th century. What may however be new though is the idea of arousal through furry sex. Most of the animal sex portrayed in those fables (which of course was mostly rape) was usually just to showcase how irredeemable a character in the story truly was or was part of a plan of that particular character to escape authority.
• Aarrgh, those amateurs all over the Internet who make Leave the Camera Running videos about their private life that nobody is interested in! Surely this phenomenon never existed before the Internet was invented, right? Well... already in the 1960s, Andy Warhol was making movies in which a shot of the Empire State Building was shown for 24 hours straight or a man was just eating for minutes on end. Also take in account many of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's albums, which often feature a lot of audio footage of them fooling around by making weird and often annoying sounds or them expressing their love for one another. Not to mention silent-era cinema in the Soviet Union, such as Man with a Movie Camera, which were quick scenes of ordinary people doing ordinary things.
• Many people like to believe that Epic Rap Battles of History invented fictional characters or celebrities rapping as a novelty. Not quite... MC Hawking predated the battles by several years AND actually sounded like Hawking. And a rapping Hitler? Whitest Kids U Know did it several years before they did and Mel Brooks did it back in the 80s!
• Funny cat videos didn't originate with YouTube, but with Thomas Edison's boxing cats film reel.
• The BBC published a YouTube video of the journey from Heathrow Terminal 5 to Cockfosters on the London Underground, greatly speeded up (taking five minutes instead of about an hour),and one of the comments asked if they got the idea from another YouTube channel the commentor was aware of. They didn't; back in the 1950s, when what is now BBC 1 used to show interlude films between programmes, one of them was London to Brighton in 4 minutes. The idea is probably older than that.
• There are many people who think the memetic "Who's that Pokémon?" "It's Pikachu!" originated on a Vine video, but a different video with the same purpose was originally uploaded in 2007 by YouTube user gameboy659.
• Old Gays is a Youtube series about four older gay men discussing their lives and reacting to modern gay culture. In one video, they each discuss a past love from their younger days: how they met, how long they were together, etc. When it was Jesse's turn, he showed a picture of himself and his ex from 23 years prior. When the (much younger) producer asked how they met, Jesse said they met online, much to the producer's surprise. The men laughed at him for being so naive; after all, it was 1996, right when the Internet was going mainstream, and the LGBT community took to online dating much faster and with less stigma than straights (especially gay men).
• Many younger internet users tend to think that the surreal, "post-ironic" style of internet humor emerged in the mid-to-late 2010s, when in fact a lot of early 2000s internet content could be argued as even more weird in its individuality instead of relying on repeated memes. The comment section of this video (created in 2004) is full of people surprised at its age.
• The Slender Man Mythos originated in a photoshop topic about creepy images in the forums of Something Awful in 2009. However, it is not the first internet-born urban legend about an extremely tall humanoid entity that stalks people and is visible only to their preys: by coincidence, a creepypasta about Hachishakusama, the Eight-Feet-Tall Woman, suddenly appeared on the Japanese 2chan board in 2008. This specter became a decently well-known urban legend in her home country, but never reached the massive widespread popularity that Slender Man enjoyed, her most high-profile appearance being a random malevolent ghost in the fifth Fatal Frame video game.
• Although the term "LOLCats" was coined in the 2000s, the idea of taking cat photos and adding humorous text to them dates back to the 1870s.
• The "yelling/screaming girl" meme, which became unavoidable on American social media in August of 2022, derived from a picture taken at a nightclub in Argentina in 2018 (the girl was actually singing to her boyfriend) and had previously gone viral on Spanish-language social media in 2019.
• Many people believe that Cocomelon is a newer children's channel on YouTube and dates to at least the late half of the 2010s. As this post explains, it's actually been around in some form since 2006, when it was called ThatsMeOnTV. Despite this, nursery rhymes didn't appear on the channel until 2013, when they changed their name to ABCKidTV.

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