[0439] Manifesto Of The Generation WWW
└ posted on Thursday, 20 December 2012, by Novil
- Richard: Oh no! “Harry’s Hardware Talk” has been taken offline!
- Sandra: Did you visit the site often?
- Richard: Not anymore. Harry stopped updating it in 2005, so the forums died a slow death as well. But back in the day, I even wrote a few articles for the site.
- Sandra: So it’s just nostalgia?
- Richard: Just nostalgia? Harry’s website is a significant part of the history of the internet!
- Richard: Back in the 90’s, the WWW was a blank canvas. It was enthusiasts like Harry who gave the painting color and form, and they received no stock options for it!
- Richard: We were part of something that would become the biggest invention in the history of mankind. It still feels like a miracle how fast everything happened.
- Richard: But without great websites like Harry’s, the WWW would never have caught on like that!
- Sandra: You’re probably right. Sorry for your loss…
- Richard: Plus, who could ever forget that glorious day in the summer of ’99 when Mary123 posted her naked pictures?
![[0439] Manifesto Of The Generation WWW](/comics/2012-12-20-0439-manifesto-of-the-generation-www.png "[0439] Manifesto Of The Generation WWW")
Loading ...
Oh, posting pictures on naked unwilling women on the Internet? Classy… ¬¬
I sure didn’t forget… of course, it’s hard to forget something you never witnessed yourself, as you were never there to remember it.
Pillamelai wrote:
That’s just your interpretation. Although I wasn’t aware of it when writing the strip, the last panel might be somewhat ambiguous. I think I’ll change it since the joke works either way.
It’s always comes back to nudity on the Interent, doesn’t it?
Pillamelai wrote:
Says the one with the suggestive avatar. XD
Pillamelai wrote:
And how do you even know they were unwilling? If you didn’t notice, he said she posted pictures of herself. Doesn’t sound very unwilling to me. My guess is that was the day internet porn was invented.
Ah, those heady naked pic days when they downloaded at a 1900 baud rate!
Yo, Rick, use http://www.archive.org 😀 😀 😀
Boy, dose that take me back to the AOL years. =D
Dammit, you creative bastard! Now I feel old!!! {=(
I like the detail about how tiny most websites look full screen on modern monitors nowadays.
Richard will be voiced by Crispin Freeman! I called it.
I see. Richard forgot to download before the site vanished, and is thus morose.
The internet was “the biggest invention in the history of mankind.”
Then 4chan appeared and the shred of human dignity that it created aptly vanished in a puff of pornography and cats.
Porno pics aside, I know how Richard feels. I’ve been online since the days of BBS’es (that’s Bulletin Board Systems for you youngins), and on the Net since the ’80s, long before the Web even existed. Things were quite different then. Not just the tech, but the people you met, which were mostly college students and professionals. Having an intelligent conversation back then wasn’t hard to find. In some ways, the worst thing that happened to cyberspace was when online services like AOL and Prodigy (or as I liked to call them, AOHell and Plodigy) gave their users Net access. However, for the most part, the Internet has turned out pretty good.
Richard seems a bit lonely lately. It must be tough to be the only single adult in a world where even the adolescents and animals have found long-term relationships.
Well, to quote Trekkie Monster… Eh, maybe I shouldn’t.
@ Strife:
good choice…cloud should be voiced by spike spencer (akari shinji from evangelion)
@ Mortarm:
Not forgetting AOhell’s habit of putting free trial floppy discs (and later CDs) on the front cover of almost every computer magazine as well as in many shops. There’s a theory they were a boon to spammers as whenever their account got terminated due to misuse, they’d simply start another trial with a different set of details – after all, it wasn’t costing them anything…
Neospector wrote:
Indeed, the cats are doing horrible things to us!
Suddenly, I miss my old Geocities Digimon site 🙁
Richard, don’t be sad. I need to introduce you to some other sites, where naked women post pictures of themselves all over. Plus, they are likely more attractive then anyone on a hardware site. Welcome… To internet porn.
Whole new meaning to Hardware there lol. Makes one wonder if this Mary invented rule 34.
Neospector wrote:
Tell that to the Arab Spring protesters and see what they think of your over simplification. All great things have drawbacks to them. The tangible proof that we walked on the moon are a few rocks, but the real legacy is in the technologies we use everyday without thinking about the miracles of human ingenuity they are like satellite communications and computers. Oh and Tang, who could ever forget Tang.
The internet is really really great.
FOR PORN!
I have a fast connection, so I don’t have to wait!
FOR PORN!
There’s always some new site.
FOR PORN!
I browse all day and night!
FOR PORN!
It’s like I’m surfing at the speed of light!
FOR PORN!
Thank you, Avenue Q.
@ Pillamelai:
Who said she was unwilling? Especailly since he did it herself.
Wow…the ‘net as the biggest invention in the history of mankind? Buzz Aldrin’s quote on MIT Tech Review has it: “You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got Facebook.” To a nuts-and-bolts engineer from a land of software guys (Silicon Valley), the attitude that agriculture, medicine, industry, and cities are less important than LOLs and walls and tweets (and pr0n) is 100% right and even more funny than the quite well framed punchline.
@ Mortarm:
As someone who was born at the dawn of this great internet age I would just like to say, tell me more about the times when the majority of people online were intelectuals looking to sharpen their minds and not a bunch of knuckle draging neanderthals on the hunt for porn and people to piss off, it sounds like a true paradise.
Reflecting on naked photos, Richard? You BLOWHARD…
Yea I gotta say that my sense of humor doesn’t line up with this joke well but I understand the sentiment in most of this stripe.
Damn I remember those days. The Old Geocites with HTML chats and webpage set up in neighborhoods , L ‘hotel chat rooms, and basic html based webpages. Back when nearly everyone RP when they came in to the “room”.
Still miss those days.
AHA! Now we know when Internet porn began! A historical moment! Put it on a stamp, mint commemorative coins!
@ Malchus:
Of course! All the teens are looking for porn, all the adults are looking for teen porn.
…Does Harry have tome relation to Tom?
@ Frozenwolf150:
Maybe he’s like Rod and he has a girlfriend who lives in Canada.
@ Blueflame:
Oh, I agree. There was our fair share of idiots, but relatively speaking, it was a lot better before the floodgates opened, IMO.
The Summer of Love of 1999. Those were the days, Richard.
*inserts obvious joke about “hardware” and genitalia here*
firedome wrote:
@firedome I don’t know…I’d rather have Cloud be voiced by Joel McDonald. I’ll think of a full dream cast list later.
@ Pillamelai:
Who said it was unwillingly ?
@ Nick/Tyrong:
You got that right, Nick. 😉
I started reading the comic today from page one after seeing an ad for it. I must say it is a very good comic. there were many pages that made me burst into laughter and many that were rather cute and made me smile as well. After some recent events it was something i really needed. so thank you for posting your comic for us to read.
@ illeatyourself:
She assumes that because she wants something to complain about.
This one gave me a slight heartache. I’ve been a member of several internet communities that went the way Harry’s did. You watch them dying for years, knowing that one day it’ll be gone. The members of the sites become almost like family until they just disappear from the site as well. Sometimes you have their contact info, but even if you do it’s never the same communicating with them outside of that site.
The Harry’s of the internet are dying. They’re already hard to find, and when you do they just don’t have the magic they once did when we were all younger and had more time to be part of internet forums. There will always be a place in my heart for these kinds of sites, even as I’ve moved on and live mostly in the real world now. RIP Harry’s and every site like it that has slowly left us in the post myspace internet.
Wow, I was just recently thinking about stuff online that suddenly gets taken down, so it did strike a cord with me, even though I don’t have any nostalgic memories of Web 1.0
@ firedome:
That “actor” should never be allowed near a microphone again.
Hard to know without Sandra’s exact birth-date, but considering that she’s is in her tweens (12 going on 13) by my calculations that means that back in the summer of 99′ Richard was still married and Sandra’s mom was either in her pregnancy’s late third trimester or had just given birth…and Richard was perving on some other woman’s nude pics.
Usaul confusion between the internet (the hardawre) and the web (an application commonly used on ther hardware)
@ Frozenwolf150:
The internet is for ………………..
I get that Early-Internet Nostalgia…
In fact, I get Nostalgia for every stage of the Internet BEFORE Facebook became a thing.
It was Watmough’s Extrasolar Visions I miss second most. Most I miss Watmough himself. RIP