The Case of Missing Elves, Al Gore, Bill Gates, The Internet and Who Is Running Around Naked.

The Christmas season seems to be the time to share special stories.  To try and make an attempt at showing I can be traditional, I decided to share a special story with all of you.  So sit back, drink some coffee, and enjoy the ride.

There once was a thingy called ARPANET.  It was owned by the US Government and used for the communications and other odds and ends by the Military.  And spying on each other.  After a number of years, for some reason, they decided that this technology didn’t suit them anymore, plus everyone was catching on to the whole spying thing so they decided to spy on others.  They did this by opening it up so that ARPANET was connected to more Major Universities, which is where the four original serves were in the first place, Universities.  This, of course, allowed them to spy on college students, making them realize that all college students like to drink and party and run naked around campus.

Their enjoyment of learning of this made them want to expand on the idea.  They wanted to know who else was running around naked.  The problem was, how to expand the audience.  They didn’t know what to do.

Luckily for them, there was this nerdy little guy working in his garage on an idea.  This nerdy little guy liked computers, the original ones.  The ones where you had to punch holes in cards and have reels of magnetic tape (think cassette tapes on a grand scale) to make a computer work.  This nerdy guy hated punching holes in the cards, because he got to many paper cuts.  His idea was to create software that would run a computer, on a much smaller scale, that could be used by everyone, and of course avoid paper cuts.  His name was Bill Gates.  The problem was, there wasn’t a smaller computer out there.

But that problem was solved by a company called Intel.  The man who ran Intel was a mean, grouchy person.  You see, he wanted to be rich and have a company that was so powerful, he could influence everything.  So he went to the North Pole and kidnapped some of Santa’s elves, because he had a devious plan.  He brought the elves back to Intel and put them in a large room.  At first, the elves were all like, “Hi! We’re Elves and what would you like for Christmas this year?”  But they soon became depressed when Mr. Intel told them to shut up and invent a processor to go into a miniature computer.  At first, they refused, using the argument that they didn’t know anything about computers because they made toys, but Mr. Intel tossed a few Christmas Trees into a fire and told them they were next.  That was when the first processors for small home computers were made.  This was the famous 286 processor.

This caused IBM to make a small computer that was suitable for use in anyone’s home, but then they got mad because other companies stole their idea and made computer’s that were cheaper than IBM’s.

The 286 DOS based machine was a wonderful thing.  It had 64K of RAM, a 20 Meg hard drive and a 2500 baud modem.  I owned one.  I had dreams of being a writer.  But, I was in my twenties, and every time I saw my wife, I would end up chasing her around the house for reasons that have nothing to do with computers because Internet Porn didn’t exist yet.  This is when I learned that my wife should have been a track star, because man, can she run fast.  She is also as slippery as an eel.  But that is another story.

The DOS part I mentioned?  That was Bill Gates’ software and he went from being a Nerdy Computer Guy to making his first million.

This is when the Government got back into the swing of things because they still wanted to know about all the people running around naked.  So they released control of the computer network that they had and the Internet was silently born.

But it didn’t look like the internet and no one knew about it.  To talk to other people on-line, which people have wanted to do forever for some reason, due to an unusual fear of telephones, they had these things called Bulletin Boards.  You could use your computer to “dial into” a bulletin board, get software you didn’t need and talk to people you didn’t like.

When Al Gore heard about this, he immediately gathered some friends behind locked doors and announced that he had an idea.  An idea where people could send messages to each other, and by people, he meant everyone.  Before, only those connected to the ARPANET could do that.  He also said it would be a neat way to share information, and of course, allow the Government to spy on people, just to see who was running around naked everywhere.  So they created a new protocol that allowed anyone to sign up for an “e-mail” account and send messages to anyone who had an “e-mail” account.  At first, you had to go through a provider, which was the Bulletin Boards or AOHELL (which started out as a special Bulletin Board for fat old men who could pretend to be cute 15 year old girls).  So good old Al decided to call his new invention the “INTERNET”.  And the word started to spread.

In the mean time, Bill Gates, now a millionaire came up with this idea to update his DOS software because he got tired of typing.  That’s right, not only does he hate paper cuts but he also hated calluses on his fingers.  He decided he needed a really fancy name to attract attention to his new software so he named it “Windows”.  It allowed people to pull up programs by clicking on them with a mouse.  The mouse got it’s name from a young lady, who upon looking at the device, said “aw, how cute, it has a tail and looks like a mouse”.  Did I mention she had bad eyesight and refused to get glasses?  Well she did.

It wasn’t long before people were buying computers, Intel was forcing elves to create better processors and IBM was still rather furious that they had lost the battle on building the household computer.

All in all, it was a long journey that started before I even graduated high school.  But eventually we had  the Internet as we know it today.  A place where people still talk to others they don’t want to, send important e-mails (jokes and Viagra advertisements), join social networks to announce their every move such as “I just shaved my Head – Brittney Spears”, write blogs, and of course, Internet Porn.  Interestingly enough, no one admits to paying for it, but Internet Porn has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is how Al Gore invented the Internet, Bill Gates became one of the richest men on earth, people stopped believing in Santa Claus because of missing elves, Intel became an Industrial Giant, how IBM got into other things, how a multi-billion dollar industry was born, and how the Government knows who is running around naked, and why you are reading this blog post.

I hope you enjoyed the story and please, feel free to comment on how wonderful it was.