The Victorian Inter-Net

b3ta.com asked: What would the Victorians have made of the Internet?

For starters, being such hyphenation maniacs, they would have called it the “Inter-Net”. After that, b3ta readers came up with a hilarious set of graphics depicting the Internet, had it been created by the Victorians. Some examples:

(Click on any of the pictures to see the whole collection.)

Today, we have RateMyRack.com [Not safe for work!]. The Victorians were — at least in public — considerably more prudish:

Here are TLDs (top-level domains, such as .com, .net and .org) in the Victorian era:

An iPod ad:

When I mentioned b3ta’s “Victorian Internet” gag to Boss Ross, he replied that the Victorians did have an Internet of sorts — the telegraph. Was it like this?

…or like this?

(The Morse Code in the window shown above actually deciphers into real text. Deciphering is left as an exercise for the reader.)

It was the heyday of inventors:

And here’s what my employer, Tucows — formerly an acronym for The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software — would have been like:

Other goodies:

• Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, done in 1337speak!
• Never mind Minesweeper — how ’bout Chimneysweeper?
• A guide to Victorian emoticons
• Maps of open wireless access points!
• And of course, the doctored photo of the “World Trade Center Tourist Guy”.