Downloading The Internet

Have a look at the animated image below. It’s one of those funny animated gifs that made it’s way around the internet via email and web sites four or five years ago (6,322 Internet years). It appears that the viewer is downloading the entire Internet within a single zip file and states that only 14kb of 23,993,564,998mb (that’s all??) have been copied at 41.2kb/Sec. It prompts for a new disc (remember those?) to be inserted in drive A (remember drive A?) because disc C is full. Scary shit. Not.

It was meant to amuse and was so outrageous that most, even Internet users of a half decade ago should have got the joke. But notice that I said most Internet users. Not everyone took the joke for what is was and mistook it for this century’s version of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

But first, a bit of background.

My job requires me, among other things, to create new online systems for shuffling information between employees within our organization. Many years ago I created a simple form submission database for employees to send information requests to other departments, advised the employees that needed to be aware of the new system and launched the system with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever. For the amusement of those that were using the system I replaced the form completion confirmation page with the animated image below and didn’t hear a word about it until a week or so later when I received an interesting voice-mail message.