Hatrack River Forum: Laughs from the past

This is topic Laughs from the past in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :

As a few people know, I'm doing a research paper on Internet dialect. As part of my research I checked out a internet terminology dictionary from 1994. I figured it would help me trace down some history a little better, and it was the only one in the exhaustive school library at BYU-I (I swear I feel like I'm walking into a thrift store book section every time I go in there). Anyway, I just decided to look through it a little and I found this:

"Partly because the Internet's acceptable use policies don't encourage it, and partly because it simply hasn't been done that much, wide-spread commercial advertising on the Internet has been a rarity--until recently. When one new Internet user innocently posted to several newsgroups a chain-letter style notice titled "Make Money Fast," he was swamped with hundreds of letters pointing out that his post was--at the least--bad netiquette, certainly annoying, and maybe even illegal. The mountains of flame-mail prompted a rare public apology posted in dozens of places around the net.
'I am sorry and feel deep remose for the blatant abuse of Internet privileges," the user (who won't be identified, having suffered enough already) wrote. "I would like a second chance from you all to prove that I am not an ass. Please accept my apology, Internet, and understand the regret that I feel."

[ROFL]

I about died after reading that. The first spammer actually ended up apologizing for advertising on the Internet! We've come a long way haven't we?

edit: Oh yeah, the book is "net.speak: The Internet Dictionary" by Tom Fahey.

[ October 29, 2004, 02:44 AM: Message edited by: Boris ]

Posted by Dan_raven (Member # 3383) on :

[Smile]

Now, how can we get the others to apologize?