CAMBRIDGE – Historians studying ancient documents from the dawn of the information age have recently discovered that the holiday known today as Cyber Monday can be traced all the way back to the legendary festival of CompuServehain.
“This is a very exciting development in the field of sacred computational observation,” said the lead historian on the project, Basil Danforth. “Until now, it was commonly believed that Cyber Monday began spontaneously in the early 2000s to encourage users to shop online after shopping in stores on Black Friday. But now we know the day has a storied history that stretches back to the beginning of human memory, some time in the mid-1980s.”
In ages past, CompuServehain marked the end of the BBS harvest season and the beginning of virtual winter, when computer users would huddle around their Tandy 1000s and bask in its green glow while waiting days for a single 1KB file to be downloaded over a landline.
“CompuServehain was the point of the calendar year when ancients believed the boundaries between the mortal realm and the Cyber World was at its thinnest,” Danforth explained. “Households would often leave out offerings of Doritos 3D and Crystal Pepsi to ward off worms, or as they used to be known, wyrms.”
At the turn of the millennium, the old world of CompuServe gave way to a faster internet that could be used to securely make online purchases and the web’s oldest, nerdiest rituals were subsumed into the ever expanding electronic culture of the casual normie user.
“The traditional CompuServehain is still celebrated today on a couple of the most primordial text-only message boards, but for most of society, it’s only to be found in traces on Cyber Monday,” Danforth said. “The ‘ding’ noise some sites make when you purchase from them? That’s not emulating a cash register, that’s a remnant of the ‘ding ding, boing boing, static’ dial up sound people would listen to from sunrise to sunset on CompuServehain.”
“So please know that when you see that package of socks for 30% off and say to yourself, ‘might as well, I could use some new socks’, you’re not just getting a pretty good sock deal, you’re participating in a rite that connects you to the very first home internet users, a group of humans so primitive and removed from our current mindset that most would burst into tears and/or screams at the sight of even the most basic Star Wars emoji.”
The same team that has made this remarkable CompuServehain discovery have also recently found primary sources which suggest that ‘AOL’ was an early online service provider and not, as has been assumed by experts, proto-leetspeak for ‘all okay, laddies?’
