The Internet Song
Hah! I just dug this up. I wrote it for an Internet awareness training course in 2002. I’ve just made a couple of minor amendments, but I think it’s probably good enough to share:
The Internet Song
(to the tune of Monty Python’s Galaxy Song)
(with apologies to Eric Idle)
If the Net in which you’re fishin’
isn’t doing what you’re wishin’,
If all your Google searches come back “Null”
If the page you’ve hunted for
says “File not found” and “404”,
If you tend to find statistics rather dull…
Just remember that it started
when the Sputnik first departed
on its orbit back in 1957
The American Defense Department
thought it would make sense
to defend against this Soviet threat in heaven
So a thinktank – codenamed ARPA –
was established with this charter
and in ‘69 the ARPANET began
with just four computer hosts
the net linked up the US coasts
just as Armstrong made his “one small step for Man”
In the Seventies it grew
and by 1982 they were calling it “The Internet” instead
It grew to twenty-five thousand times its size by 1989
- the year Tim Berners-Lee devised the World Wide Web
And by Christmas ‘93 – Blobby Blobby Blobby Blobby –
60 countries were connected to the Net:
Cameroon, Tunisia, Estonia,
Thailand, Chile, Taiwan, India,
Israel, Mexico, Korea and Kuwait.
50 new sites every day
First cybercafe in UK,
and then everyone gets Windows 95
It’s bundled with IE – although it’s only Version 3 –
but now Netscape finds it harder to survive.
The press say “Browser War”, and sales of modems soar
- now there’s 20 million people on the Net
browsing 3.6 million web pages (now that’s going to take you ages
- how much bigger can these crazy figures get?)
2.7 trillion emails sent in 1997
30 priests appear on “Catholic Priests Online”
There’s 186 thousand miles of undersea telephone cables
by the time Somalia gets hooked up in 1999
7 billion mails each day – and that’s just the USA –
China’s netizens quadruple in two years
The Millennium Bug’s OK but things don’t go the DotComs’ way
- the bubble bursts; the millionnaires all hit the beers.
Now we’re digitally divided – it’s a fact; you just can’t hide it
More than half the surfers still live in the States:
80 million and still rising,
and it’s really not surprising that the Third World pays to surf at higher rates
But technology’s progressing, so don’t find it too depressing
if you’re feeling overprivileged to surf,
though you might want to remember on eleventh of September
it could still be here when no-one’s left on Earth…
