At 2:56pm on 6 August, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee launched the very first website, setting in motion a chain of events that would ultimately end with Nyan Cat. Here are 20 things we'd never have seen if it weren't for his invention.
1. Extreme Japanese pornography
Rule 34 states that if you can imagine it, somebody's made pornography about it - and that means most of us have seen things we'd rather we hadn't.
2. Web celebs
Tron Guy, Star Wars Kid, Afro Ninja, Leave Britney Alone, Angry German Kid, Numa Numa... each one immortalised for eternity, or at least until Google shuts down YouTube.
3. Tea bagging
We genuinely didn't know what this was until we played multiplayer online games.
4. Conspiracy nuts
Like an online dating service for crazy people, the web has enabled birthers, truthers and people who think Prince Philip is an evil alien lizard to find one another.
5. Lots of cats
Whether they're Nyan Cat, LOLcats, Keyboard Cat, Ceiling Cat [language may offend] or just endless pictures of cute kittens, it's clear that cats are the web's favourite creatures.
6. Dancing Matt
A man called Matt dancing badly around the world is just the kind of quirky thing the web was invented for.
7. Funny Amazon reviews
The song Hot Shot City is particularly good.
8. Ok Go
Have you ever bought an Ok Go record? Can you even hum one of their songs? Us neither. But everyone online has seen at least one of their videos.
9. Beedogs
10. Hacktivism
Hacktivism is a broad church that encompasses satirists, coders, Wikileaks and groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, and we're only beginning to see what it's capable of.
11. Fakes
Fake websites, fake images, fake products, fake news reports, even fake deaths of fake people: the web is a dangerous place for the gullible or quick to click.
12. Memes
From All Your Base to Emo Dad [language may offend], you never know what the web will decide to find funny.
13. The Flying Spaghetti Monster
Originally created in response to humourless Creationist school boards, the FSMhas unfortunately since been adopted by many equally humourless atheists. God finds that funny.
14. Taiwanese animated news
1-Apple News takes world events and animates them poorly. The result is, of course, comedy gold, whether it's Tiger Woods' marital difficultiesor Gordon Brown's alleged bullying.
15. PostSecret
There are very few websites that can make us cry, but PostSecret's little postcards are often like punches to the solar plexus.
16. Unhappy combinations
Some things really don't go together. iPhones in blenders. Mentos in Diet Coke. Beauty pageant contestants and video cameras.
17. A shrimp running on a treadmill to the theme from the Benny Hill show
Still funny five years on.
18. Slash fiction
Adding a whole new meaning to the term "Harry Potter's magic wand". No, we're not linking to it.
19. The Onion
America's finest news source has been widely imitated, but never bettered.
20. The fundamental decency of humanity
Not many laughs in that one, we know, but despite lots of evidence to the contrary - most of it listed above - it's true. People on the web are brilliant and we love you all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liked this? Then check out 20 websites that changed the world
Sign up for TechRadar's free Week in Tech newsletter
Get the hottest tech stories of the week, plus the most popular reviews delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up at http://www.techradar.com/register
No comments