How Midi Forever Changed the Internet, Part I

The internet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 2003, and since then, the landscape has changed drastically.  Users once lived in Homepages, but no longer: the internet has provided them with blogs, Facebooks or Twitters to call their own.  There is now a vast system of Youtubes, inhabited by webcam-wielding 13-year-olds.  Most significantly, the internet now gives its users these gifts free of charge or Computer Science prerequisites.

You may ask yourself, "How did I get here?  Where does this information superhighway come from?"  The events leading up to this new era (sometimes called Web²) are poorly documented and often forgotten (largely because Wikipedians keep reverting my edits).  It is therefore my great pleasure, dear friends, to present, in complete and thoroughly researched detail, the story of how midi forever changed the internet.


In the Beginning Was the Command Line

Long ago, the internet was a text-based dungeon fraught with danger. Its sole inhabitants were a technocratic cult of wizards, the only people powerful enough to tame this frontier. For the time, the non-wizard public had to be content with the relative safety provided by AOL and similar services. With the advent of the Wide World-Web, however, everything changed.

The wizards had added graphics to a portion of the internet, and it was now safe for a new generation of users to venture out and explore. What they found was mostly confusing to them, but also wildly fascinating. They moved around by riding WebCrawlers, capable of taking them to the StarTrek webpage, the NASA webpage, or the MIT webpage. It didn't take long before they started to want webpages of their own; the frontier was wide open, and they were ready to stake their claim.

My midi collection. You are the visitor to my Homepage

Construction guys building a Geocities Homepage

To create webpages, they needed to learn to html, a technique not easily mastered.  By observing the techniques of the wizards, however, this new generation of users were able to pick up the basics of the skill. With the assistance of animated construction guys, they founded Geocities, and built themselves Homepages. It was a golden, prosperous time.

DOOM midi is pretty cool, actually

Just like today's internet users, the citizens of Geocities enjoyed trading music with one another. They were limited in their choices of format, however. The internet's tubes were significantly smaller then; so they got used to midi, the only format small enough to fit. It was a decision made out of necessity, but one that would have consequences not even the wizards could have predicted.