Gibson Garbage Files: 2013

Below is a series of ads for the once-popular CompuServe, the mother of all online services that hit friction against AOL by the mid-1990s, tried to rebrand itself as Wow! (like the Internet, only faster) to appeal to the edgier netizen, and eventually wound up as this -- which, perhaps unintentionally, has more in common with a parked domain than an actual web service (see: weathr.com). CompuServe's place in history is secure, though--and not just as the butt of e-mail related jokes (wait...your e-mail is "@compuserve.com? I guess this marriage isn't going to last after all)--but as the progenitor of commercially viable online service provision. People of a certain generation either remember popping into the sterilized Internet provided by AOL's billboard (e-mail, chat rooms, games, etc.), or CompuServe's tray of information starters (think jalapeno poppers, not full-on smothered chopped steak). And the very thought tickles those people with nostalgia for 28.8 kbps modems, MIDI tunes of Soundgarden songs, and the long-gone whimsy of using a tool that had no equal, no comparable predecessor, and seemed like it might disappear into the ether like so many video game consoles.

CompuServe's ads in the 1980s were as cheesy and overwrought as any ad for Benson & Hedges or Hai Karate, but one particular campaign put the reader in the poor computer's shoes, forced to look down the slobbering gullets of the most mundane web users imaginable. Interestingly enough, many of the now-common Internet usage scenarios were presaged:

Bored White Couple Who Only Own One Wine Glass

Obnoxious White Kid With Clueless Parents

Lots of White People in Highly Educated Professions and Token Black Jazz Musician

To be fair, it was the 1980s and Zero Cool had yet to crash 1,507 systems in one day and cause a single-day 7-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange; Reagan was being a massive buzzkill; and most new users were so far from understanding the Beast and what it would one day become (beware Singularity!). I wouldn't expect an upstart ISP to plaster ad space with images of phreaks, hackers, crackers, and zitty dweebs (or, you know, black people that aren't saxophonists), but they (the ads) serve as excellent examples of Internet sterilization, a phenomenon that still pops up with regularity (which is a necessary move for any new tech, as it has to shed the skin of subculture in order to be consumable by the LCD, which leads to true success).

The following adds depart from this trend and appeal to:

Bull-wrangling medical photography pilots who own checkbooks and enjoy He-Man or Buck Rogers

People whole like to read a lot

The following is an assortment of GIFs from University of Florida's Grove, a now-defunct personal website hosting service for students, staff, and faculty. These GIFs, which were acquired via Wayback Machine's 1996 snapshot of Grove, range from the once-ubiquitous construction GIF to the absurdly annoying "Bottom 95% of all Web Sites" badge many netizens used to wear as badges of ironic honor.

The majority of these GIFs, whether animated or static, seemed to be wielded for no greater purpose than sprucing up one's website, to add a cascade of pizzaz hopefully unrepeated by another. As we all know, these GIFs were, in fact, repeated -- by everyone. I like to imagine that there was some "prime GIFer", some bot that expelled random GIFs from its snout like the lovesick computer I'm sure is responsible for composing Harlequin romance novels from a series of bank of key terms and a repository of shirt-ripping scenarios. The truth, however, is likely less intriguing.