(UPDATE) The photo mentioned from reddit is in fact real,a̶n̶d̶ h̶a̶s̶ b̶e̶e̶n̶ u̶n̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶e̶d̶. T̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ t̶h̶e̶ s̶a̶m̶e̶ i̶m̶g̶u̶r̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ l̶i̶n̶k̶e̶d̶ i̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ r̶e̶d̶d̶i̶t̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ m̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶e̶d̶ b̶y̶ t̶h̶e̶ u̶s̶e̶r̶ j̶o̶o̶e̶s̶ h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶//i̶m̶g̶u̶r̶.c̶o̶m̶/E̶V̶f̶Z̶4̶ I found the exact reddit thread www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/kkcc6/update/ p̶.s̶ w̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ I̶'m̶ n̶o̶t̶ 1̶0̶0̶%̶ s̶u̶r̶e̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ s̶a̶m̶e̶ p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶, I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ m̶y̶ d̶o̶u̶b̶t̶s̶ a̶l̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ i̶t̶'s̶ a̶ v̶e̶r̶y̶ c̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ m̶a̶t̶c̶h̶. I̶ d̶o̶ 1̶0̶0̶%̶ b̶e̶l̶i̶e̶v̶e̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶a̶l̶k̶e̶d̶ a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ r̶e̶d̶d̶i̶t̶. It isn't him like I had figured, it's another man by the name of Tim Madison p.s.s yes the "more recent" image is now literally one of the first related images on google, something changed since this videos posting I can promise you it wasn't there prior to this videos posting. (Videos Mentioned) The internet Is Dying - th-cam.com/video/mr026OIMYRE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NNPnfR4x1cfTZ5YC Google Search Decay, Internet Rot - th-cam.com/video/vwVFzY8XqIo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=86QQRam3LYvYvKKI Olda'vista - th-cam.com/video/HpSYLD1xHPE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=e23qKchPEFaR_6hN
@@patratrick are we *sure* that isn’t? Cus fuck man that shit is extremely convincing, or maybe it’s just me seeing the walls look the same and my mind is just convincing me it is
Yes. I just stared at this photo for awhile and when it came out I remembered him as either morbidly obese or extremely frail. I notice now he’s not extremely overweight (not by today’s standards) and has oddly impressionable muscle definition. As if he were to go outside and lift weights he wouldn’t look nerdy. Then I move to the face and the horror sets in.
@@UserUser-zc6fxI was going in the comments to see if someone has pointed this out yet: the 5.25” were used with XTs (my dad had a XT for years…with a whopping 30MB hard drive). However, since 5.25” disks continued to be used on through the 90s….the picture probably is from mid to late 80s.
I used to be a huge fan of a Japanese singer. I would scour the internet for hours on certain days looking for any older material about them from the 90’s I could find and save it because I had learned about link rot and lost media stuff.(I still have all of this media to this day) One day my search led me to an old angelfire website of another fan who at the time impressively knew about stuff going on in Japan at the time and had acquired magazines, interviews, and etc that they scanned and uploaded to their angelfire page. They had an old email that I tried to message because I had become enamored with this website and this person. I felt like I had met another fan I felt I could really connect to. Unfortunately they never emailed back so I assume they abandoned the email address but to this day I look back on that website/day and wonder what they’re doing now, if they’re still a fan, etc. I really miss the old internet and I’m glad I got to experience it myself before it died off.
Idk why but the internet from the past felt more big and with better quality, i always found what i was searching or i find pages like yoi are describing. Nie if you try to find something you will encounter BS content.
In fact, with the internet today, the amount of lost information is higher as ever. I was told the internet never forgets, but 99% of data on the internet just disappears over time.
Truly. I randomly decided to google myself the other day, as one does when it randomly comes to mind lmfao. Compared to the last time, which had to have been like 7 years ago, there is one, single, solitary article about me, and all of the non-text content is link-rotted away. Its... kind of crazy. My mom made me be very involved with the local community when I was young, so there was a lot there once upon a time. Now, its all gone. There isn't even anything about my graduating class from highschool left, and that was only 11 years ago. I'm not bothered by the lack of acknowledgement or anything, its just kind of fascinating to see how fast the internet moves on?
@BT-ex7ko It's funny how all the good stuff you do; community service, helping the elderly, starting a business, etc. gets lost, but you trip and fall at the mall that _one time_ and the CCTV files are there forever! 😂
Indeed, took me 2 weeks to find a game i played on my smartphone back in 2013-2014 "Cyberlords Arcology", saddest part, when i bought it, i instantly refunded 5$, cuz it was not worth it and i play better games on PS1 emul. My point is, i tried similar wording, categories, shit even year of release, but all for nothing, until my brain dug out archives and reminded me the full name of the game.
The Internet never forgets, but the people using it do. And sometimes all that knew forget where they kept their information. That and it gets removed, usually without warning.
The floppies were 5 1/4" not 3 1/2" because of the box size. The computer monitor (and likely the computer) is an IBM clone, not an actual IBM. There were a lot of companies importing blatant IBM XT knockoffs, and putting their badge on it. The printer is the tech to try to date in the photo. The printer is a Panasonic (probably KX-P1150), and that printer was shown in advertisements in 1989 and 1990. The phone jack box means that it is likely in the US. The cigarettes don't help since Newport packaging looked like that for decades. Beyond that info, it's just a nearsighted (yes you can tell this from the photo) guy in his 30s who wore polyester.
You're absolutely right about the floppy size. Just the relative size of the box to the rest of the computer. And all of the 3M boxes looked like that back then; That I can remember clearly.
long time ago, before the pandemic , someone posted a photo in a different angle of the guy with the same computer, but its was like one those post you just read and say nice and proceed to the next post without salving it.
Gen Z dude discovers what it was like to surf the web. Every page was part of a "web ring", where each user linked to pages they liked, and on those pages you found links to pages _they_ liked, so on and so forth. The first search engines were indexed automatically, but hand tagged and curated. We didn't have the problem of "spam links" back then, where you search for something and the first 10 results are AI generated garbage drowning in ads. And everyone who had the technical know-how to build a web page was a nerd, so everyone who put up a web page was doing it like they were speaking directly to their own people. It felt very candid and intimate, despite the separation by wires. Anyway, the likelihood of finding the actual source of this photo is almost zero. A scanned photograph, likely from the late 80s, probably originally posted by someone's kid or nephew to their geocities page a decade later as a joke, downloaded and reposted without attribution a billion times.
Back in the 90s I would often start on someone's web page on something like geocities, follow their links to another page and so on. You'd end up trawling through weird and wonderful personal pages and end up on something totally unlike where you started but see a lot of interesting stuff along the way.
@@stackhat8624 And then you'd save those neat finds to your own page. The old internet was in a lot of ways both better and worse. It was harder to find things but the things you found were often very useful because people were making those pages purely for the love of it because nobody ever had any thoughts of getting famous or making money. I had a small paintball page where I'd share tips and modifications and I'd get thanks from all over the world which I thought was just the best thing ever when I was 14.
Yeah. I'm also missing the time before big, moderated business driven platforms started using our attention as currency. Back then, we happily wasted our time for free :)
@@AlbertTheLaine It's still out there. I've degoogled and had a blast online today! Websites I had forgotten about came up! And I actually clicked a top link because it was what I was searching for and not a sponsored ad :D! Even blog sites got straight to the point and I didn't waste seconds scrolling to find answers and remedies. It was a satisfying. And I hope I can do it again tomorrow :).
If you're still looking for this image, I have old memories about this image from early 2000s, like around 2000-2005... I am from Finland and I've seen this image circulated way before Reddit existed, mostly in IRC channels. I have a strong memory of hearing / reading about this image at some point later, and that the person is confirmed to be Finnish. But my memory is incredibly faded. Anyway, it might be worth checking out people who are familiar with old Finnish IRC/demo party/Assembly oldheads who were around in early 2000s. I was pretty young back then, so my memories aren't very strong.
Yeah to me this picture is also associated with Demoscene. I think if one were to ask slengpung curators, they might have an idea. I sometimes prod Gargaj when i'm trying to remember something from the 90s to mid 2000s, he has crazy memory.
for some reason this photo is somehow related to future crew in my mind, think it was some conversation I had with strobe or summat like a decade ago and probably isn't actually related specifically to future crew. might be a good point of reference for the youtuber if he sees this, though.
I also have a feeling this is from finland, and i also think he looks like finnish person. I might have seen it on kuvaton or early "lauta" forums that are basically finnish 4chan clones.
The song by Eve really brough tears to my eyes unironically, i have always wanted to make obscure arts and such just so people can find it on the internet years later. This is really inspiring
We used to pass this image around on IRC back in the mid 1990s. There was a running joke that it was this one guy in EFNET #emu, but I am fairly certain it wasn't. Anything you're finding while scouring the modern web, even through old archive searches like you were doing, is unfortunately not going to give you many clues about it's origins. Wherever this first came from, it was likely uploaded in places that are definitely not archived anywhere, unless someone out there still had 3 decade old IRC logs/newgroup posts/bbs logs/or some similar early internet message or bulletin board system. Interesting video! Gave me some good 90s internet nostalgia. Makes me wish I could remember the name of my old Geocities website to see if I could still find it on an archive, I really want to look at low res images of ska bands while listening to movie theme MIDI files on the embedded player right next to my view counter.
The Panasonic KX-P1180 dot matrix printer was released in 1989, not 1990. It was known for its reliability and affordability, commonly used in businesses and home offices during that time. Originally costing $299.99 back in 1989, this would be equivalent to approximately $745.14 in 2024 dollars.
For anyone confused by the early 2000 "anti-jock" webpage. This came after the Columbine shootings and many news outlets claimed "jocks" bullying "nerds" and "geeks" was going to erupt into more violence and shootings.
Not only that, being considered a nerd was significantly more stigmatised. Like comics, (non sports) games, computers, etc. now is significantly more mainstream and socially acceptable than back around the 2000's. It's also why music genre's like nerdcore became a thing and pretty much died out when nerd culture became more mainstream. Even long before columbine you already had this "nerd is someone socially unacceptable especially by jocks", commonly emphasised in movies. Movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" fully banked on this, a movie trope that doesn't really work anymore in the modern age.
I remember at around this time, how self-proclaimed geeks would point out the difference between geek and nerd. Like a geek was someone with weird interests or academically gifted, but retained some social skills and standards of hygiene, whereas nerds had no social skills and didn't shower. Or something like that. Moot point these days, after the rush of insta pics of girls buying non-prescription glasses and claiming "I'm such a nerd 🤓lol".
@@relo999 I find it hilarious you put the cart before the horse. The movies introduced that shit. Valley Girl speech spread because of the 1. the movie 2. Frank Zappa's "parody" (promotion) song She's A Valley Girl. Humans are malleable clumps of mud.
True, i can only describe the feeling of the internet during the early 90s as the wild west. No clear frontiers, no law & order, no huge controller over it - no urbanization.
@@johnlee7164 I remember during my childhood throughout the early to late 90s people smoked everywhere, I remember people smoking in busses, planes and resturaunts. It really did feel like every adult smoked back then.
@@armchairgeneralissimoI was 13 when I started smoking back then. They started enforcing ID at the counter when I was 16, so I hit the old vending machines, or found a spot and bought cartons which were also cheaper than by the pack. By 1992, most guys were doing Skoal bandits, dip, or chew instead of cigarettes. Bet this guy was like 16 in the photo
He's the tech guy who the hero recruits in a movie. Super antisocial and rough around the edges but incredibly intelligent, joins the hero not because he wants to save the day but because of the thrill of solving a completely unprecedented technological problem.
I was also a Taringa user years ago, I used to download tons of music in mp3 format there (illegally, of course). In those music searches, I sometimes came to pages like those of Eve Anderson, Angelfire-like pages, I remember in particular one with Korn memorabilia and stuff like that.
I'd never heard of Taringa before this (being an English speaking American) I feel like I'd oughta dive into it more. I loved how during the early internet days different countries, and languages would have their own sites with their own meme culture that'd somethings bleed into others. I.E like leak spin, and trololo. I'm sure there's probably something I didn't know that came from taringa.
@@patratrick Not Argentinian, but a Latina none the less. I have Taringa to thank for making me aware of OverClocked ReMix for example, still following to this day
@@patratrick Taringa was one of the most popular pages on the Spanish-speaking side of the internet. So many stories came from that site. I remember they used to come up with their own slang words, and everybody would use them; some of them are still used to this day. I'm currently studying computer science, and every teacher I had told us stories of them downloading stuff from Taringa, taking so long that they had to leave the computer on all night. The story that I remember the most was of a guy who, after not seeing his father for 19 years (he abandoned him at 6), asked for help on the site, and they ended up finding where he lived. The guy went there, but his father had already passed away. However, he ended up talking to his father's family. The history of Taringa is not documented at all in English, so it's a fun rabbit hole if you are interested. I recommend the video by Che Juanse, 'La complicada historia de Taringa!'. Turn on the auto-translated subtitles; they do a pretty good job for the most part, except when they translate slang words.
Hey, I just wanted to add something to your lore on the Smoking Nerd image. I started high school in 2003 and began the Web Club with a close friend, making websites using Microsoft Front Page. I was probably maintaining my site sometime between 2003 and 2007. During that time, I used the picture of the Smoking Nerd, though I don't recall the context. The only reason I remember this is because the Smoking Nerd was the first "funny" image I had seen in more than one place. As in, I saw it on the internet, uploaded it to my site, and then some time later, saw it somewhere else. It's really hard to describe the scarcity of content back then. There were a few major hubs, like Newgrounds, where content would filter through. But if you didn't see something in a place, like Newgrounds, it was unlikely you would see it somewhere else. I can't tell you when I reuploaded the image. I would say it's unlikely I used it in 2003. Probably '04 at the absolute earliest.
yeah back then we didnt have like centralized hubs like reddit or even facebook, everything was on old school forums. and there were so damn many of them, not only that some of them didnt even allow linking images or hosting imanges it was litterally all text. even back in 06 i only used a few myself, like gamespot game faqs. chat planet and cheat code central and they all catered to different content.
There is a reverse image searcher that uses facial recognition AI to find other images of the same person. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was called but it was used to identify the man in the "Find Satoshi" ARG
he got further than anybody else. but he had a huge missed oppritunity, the oldest upload he could find was still up but the website was borked. by messing with the URL he may have been able to get into some folders or another page by changing the URL to something else. also something he never did was check the actual meta data of each picture as there may have been more info there. it would have been as simple as right clicking the picture and going to properties, sometimes theres extra information there that you never knew about.
That old meme appears in several books and magazines. I'm pretty sure a soft cover tv guide or movie guide book had that image in it as an ad insert for the computer or something computer-related.
The computer/monitor/peripherals is just some IBM XT clone, not an original. Incredibly common for the day. They also used the same 3M packaging for the 5.25" line, and 5.25" drives were way more common for these machines.
This was a trip to the times of the old internet and why we may never had a result for the pic and the guy on it, sure was a ride on seeing history of old internet and the people in there ALSO: RIP Taringa, you we're too beautiful for this world and thanks to you i discovered creepypastas as a young kid on the internet
Thanks for reminding Taringa, unfortunately the site closed after the owners sell the website to crypto bros who were just interested in profit instead of focusing in listening to the community and never fixed bugs who prevented people to post original content. The site in his prime was one of the most popular websites from Latin America until social media arrived
You're probably right, I couldn't find a 5 1/4 inch with the same packaging while making this video. The size was throwing me off, but the packaging matched the 3.5. Just saw a listing for a 5 1/4 with the same packaging. Doesn't change much, aside from throwing the image date back a couple of years.
@@patratrick It's a pretty ancient computer and nobody would bother putting 3.5" drives on it when anything that came on 3.5" disks would need a more powerful computer anyway. XT case form factor also did not stick around very long so throwing a motherboard upgrade into it was not common.
@@patratrick nah man 5 and 1/4 floppies were used into the early 90s, i know because i used em and i have a drive that takes them dated 1994. the 3.5" floppies were around in the mid to late 80s but they were still really expensive compared to the bigger ones.
Knowing that almost half the links cited in supreme court documents are broken is a sobering thought, and further proof that we need to archive the history of the internet.
The internet in 1995 was by the people mostly. Companies had just caught on. It was a great time. It felt like reading the diary of strangers. Such websites just no longer exist.
And everyone online (at least everyone making their own websites) was somewhat intelligent. Everyone was willing to share information. I learned more from the early internet than anywhere else in life. The same level of information is not easy to find anymore. General low level info, sure. Plenty of dis-info. But not much advanced technical info. (The internet basically taught me electrical engineering.. a lot more too. But, w/out any schooling, I can design circuits, print boards, make very good complete products.)
I think an important reason to that might be that the early internet wasn't accessible to just anyone. These sites would be accessed mostly by tech-passionate people like themselves so people were more likely to share personal info there. These days it's way too easy to dox someone, create a deepfake video or audio from whatever you put on the internet...
I'm really sad that the Internet Wayback Machine stopped including AngelFire URLs a year or two ago. Up until then I was actually able to see the first website I ever made back in the late 90s, which consisted of a story about a date I went on where the girl crashed her car, an anime page where I had my own AKIRA-inspired fanfiction, and a tutorial on how to shaboink a Sockem Bopper inflatable boxing glove. I was a teenager, so...
Honestly while everyone else used that guy's image to make fun of nerds, I always thought he looked like a cool guy. But that's because I am a nerd, huddling around a computer with other nerds chain-smoking and fiddling with some game or other software was how I spent my young adult years.
I saw this image even in the late 90's on usenet groups (been online since 1995) with 1998 being the earliest I can even remember, and even in the early 90's those XT machine were still popular due to them being cheaper than newer 386/486 machines. He looks like he hosted or was a user of a BBS group(s). Those systems could not use Compuserve, AOL, or Prodigy which were starting to get people "online".
@@enlathxaind178 You may be right. I just recalled my earliest time seeing the keyboard warrior so it may have circulated there too way earlier on IRC. Heck for all we know it may have been originally posted on AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy. I never had those three so I would not know for sure.
@@davedavedave8929 To be honest, I really doubt it's the same person. The different hair and pictures from similar time period make it unlikely. On the reverse image search, there's a writer/journalist with the same name(without Karl) with similar facial features(without glasses). Hard to say if there's a true connection or another "red herring".
Looking at the photo of James Renner's obiturary I would say they're different people. I just can't see someone going from having curly hair that looks like it would naturally grow out into an afro having their hair straightened and cut by a blind barber. Good on you for searching though.
@@armchairgeneralissimo The man from the obituary was a bit of a joke due to similarities when searching the "James Renner" name. When searched from the picture, a few websites linked it to a writer/journalist of the same name. Not sure if done for humor or if this person really identify himself as the "Nerd".
The eve part of your video was genuinely wholesome and poignant making me tear up a bit remembering and reminiscing about a simpler time in my life so thank you
was reading through the commends and patratrick the guy who did the video was made aware and he responded to people telling him that. doesnt matter though as the date he gave in the video for the picture 1985-1990 is still very valid as both 3.5 and 5.25 disks were available in the same time frame.
@@thelasthallow In the long run, it didn't make a difference, but that's a bit of a fallacy. The cigarettes were around in 1985-1990 as well, but the cigarettes were around well before 1985. So were 5.25" floppies. They were around long before the 3.5 and the original XTs came with 5.25" discs. If that picture had been taken in 1982, and he limited his search to 1985, it would have hurt his chances of finding it. In the end, it's a minor difference, but if you want to use something to date a picture, best to do even the smallest amount of checking to make sure you're not off by half a decade. Cheers to all.
@@BillBinder Someone in this comment section said the printer is a Panasonic model, either KX-P1150 introduced in 1989 or KX-P1180, introduced in 1990.
Interesting video. Always been curious about that guy myself. But there is one thing from the early days of the internet you forgot since it's not really much of a thing anymore. E-Mail. In 2002 I was in the Air Force and deployed to the Middle East. At the time, most people in my squadron still only had their government E-Mail. Most didn't have personal accounts. But one thing we did with our E-Mail was pictures and funny stories. Most times, over half my inbox was just friends sending out funny pictures. And this was one of them. Our First Sergent legit looked like a female version of this guy, so someone printed out the picture and taped it to her door. She laughed it off and it stayed there the rest of the deployment. A lot of pics from that time period were never actually put online that much. They got around from people E-mailing them to friends and family. So there really is no way to track them after a certain point unless someone comes forward. And given some of the memes and jokes made about him and this pic, I couldn't blame him if he never did. Also, those aren't 3 1/2 inch floppies, they're the older 5 1/4. Grew up playing Oregon Trail on them in school.
Not sure I've seen one of these "what's the origin of..." videos that doesn't actually find it. I've been spoiled by that pair of Skull Trumpet videos from Jeffiot... An interesting video nonetheless, but I did spend the whole time you were talking about Eve wondering if her site secretly contained the photo, and you'd reveal it was her father or something.
I think everyone wishes you could just find the solution. It'd make a better video for sure, but sometimes it's not possible. I empathized the journey, and hoped someone could get something out of that journey like I did. Also opens a discussion for my capable investigators to maybe finish the work I've started, or add onto the mystery. Something I couldn't find during my search, but now the video is out. imgur.com/EVfZ4 here's the imgur post that's likely the source of the reddit rumor. Still not sure it's legitimate, but I can almost guarantee this is the imgur post being discussed on reddit.
I used that image around 2004, on a stock market message board! I claimed it was me in my parent's basement, daytrading while chain smoking. BTW, this image was from the BBS dial up days, pre internet. I estimate it is from 1988. I had a very similar rig, 1mb RAM, 20MB miniscribe hard drive. You had to use a modem and dial a number to the host computer, at 2400 baud using a program like Telex. US Robotics modem. I once had an operator scold me for uploading a 700K image that used up a bunch of his storage, and took hours! Started with punch cards, in case you're wondering, VAX mainframe, and not dead yet for 50 years😂
No, it's from 90s. The printer on this image (Panasonic KX-P1191) was released in 1989, and I doubt that it's brand new. BTW I also used US Robotics and Telex (I even remember, that it was written by a Romanian programmer) to dial up BBSs in mid-90s. But started in 1991 with custom made ZX Spectrum clone "Leningrad-1", which I soldered and assembled by myself - in the Soviet Union you had to make your own computer if you wanted to have one :-)
@@saszab i was reading through comments and i saw some guy say it was someone called stephan wilke? I looked at images of him and he looks similar tbf but do you think this is a troll?
@@NienNunbOnly Just googled him - no, he doesn't look like the guy from this photo. But yesterday I found another person, which looks almost exactly the same. Google "Unidentified man at an IBM System" in quotes :-)
Something doesn't add up here. You could take any random photo of any random person, even decades old, put it on the internet, and by the time it reached half the notoriety of THIS nerd pic, I can pretty much guarantee people would pop up who would claim to have sth to do with it, trying to cash in on the fame. It was taken before the age of digital photography, and people didn't usually develop their photos in those days. So there had to be at least one other human being who might identify it's author at the very least. And what about friends? Family? Relatives. School bullies?! We take photos in order to show them to somebody. Today almost anyone who isn't literal 100 is on the Internet, so there is just no way none of them ever found out how famous this photograph has become. So unless this nerd was killed in some tragic accident shortly after this photo was taken, and so did his entire neighbourhood and family, there must still be some folks out there who can shed some light on this mystery!
Even if you were to find the first upload of the image to the internet, there's no guarantee you'd be able to tell it was the first upload. What's more, considering the nature of the earlier days of the internet and memes, its possible whoever uploaded the picture isn't even the one in it. They may not even know the full story themselves, depending on who this person is to them (for all we know, its a picture of a friend's relative or something, but even the original uploader might not know for sure.) Still, I think this kind of investigation is worth doing simply for investigation's sake. We were all told growing up that the internet was forever, that things posted there would always be around. I think its important for people to realize just how untrue that is, and how important it is to preserve what's important to you...Even if its something like an embarrassing picture of a nerd smoking.
Growing up and learning "the internet is forever" was a lie is heart breaking lol. I feel like there's so many thing you just kind of have to search for (regardless of probability of finding it) because who knows you might find something long lost that's on the verge of going away forever.
@@patratrick True, the journey can be much more important than the destination after all. Internet anthropology is a subject I really love. Even if we don't find what we set out for, there's so much out there worth remembering.
this video is making very nostalgic, the world felt so new and it felt like there were possibilities around every corner. It didnt feel so hopeless as it is today. I miss it
The internet promised freedom, hope, opportunity, options, choices ... and not to be a total doomer it has in many ways. Many things that were a pain or nuisance, like lodging a tax return, are now easy. But most of the conveniences were in place by the early 2010s. Since the mid 2015s and the take over of social media the internet has become more a prison or at least a doubled edged sword.
You're wrong about the floppies, but, first .. Man, I feel like that image is just about the OG. Pretty sure it predates later stuff like Advice Dog, or Cheese Pizza (as a meme, duh), all that kind of stuff. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I DL'd that image from friggen USENET. Or even a BBS. That sh&t am old. Pure classic! As for his machine, that's a very early PC, looks almost like it could even be an actual IBM. The monitor in particular looks exactly like the OG monitor from a 5150 or XT. Those are very definitely 5 1/4" floppies, and NOT 3 1/2"s, because those probably weren't out at that time, and there's no sign his machine has 3 1/2" drives. Compare the height of the boxes with the height of the machine they're sitting next to -- those are 5 1/4"s, mate. (The IBM PC case was about 5 1/2" tall, sez Wikipedia.) Prolly doesn't even have a hard drive -- if it does, it's no more that 20 megabytes, and takes up a ton of room. That computer could be as old as '81 or '82, imho. Even the keyboard looks like one of those majestic IBM beauties that everyone wanted, back in that day.
The monitor looks like it could be a Goldstar MBM 2015. Has the same basic shape. The same 3 knobs. And a black badge in the same place. At least from pictures I found they seem to be from 1987.
@@gswanson Yeah I remember there being several brands that tried to look close enough to the actual IBM product that you'd think it was IBM product, if you just glanced in the door of an office as you walked by but if you looked close, there were little differences. I mean, if this were an IBM monitor, the badge should be clearly readable. But I was mostly concerned with clearing up the mistake about the floppy size, cause that actually affects the date estimates.
Oh, and I meant to add that I couldn't possibly count how many different Goldstar monitors I had over the years, probably including at least one of these tiny screens. And 10'll get you 20 that the monitor in the pic is amber, and not green, cause us cool dudes ONLY had amber, lol
you may be right but it doesnt change the fact that the image is still from around the time frame guessed at. so in all actuality if its from the same time frame, what you are saying doesnt actually matter.
@@thelasthallow Whether it matter to the search is irrelevant. It just demonstrates that a couple of main points of the video were wrong or inaccurate. Something I've figured out is that the printer shown in the image is a Panasonic KX-P1124 or KX-P1123 printer, which places the date of the image to probably after 1991 or 1992. Also the cup is most likely a Whirley Industries mug from the late 70s or early 80s. Maybe it hasn't solved the mystery, but I don't think it hurts to get more accurate information.
I see somebody else has already pointed out the Panasonic KX-P1180 printer from 1990. The only reason why I got rid of mine was because I could no longer get ribbon cartridges for it. But the printer worked great. Then there was Eve Anderson. I remember finding her website back in the day. I think she was using web space provided by her university back then. But I remembered her fascination with Pi... and Sexy Suzy, and wondered why it took so long for you to mention those. BTW... I downloaded Sexy Suzy and it became the first music I downloaded off the internet. MP2 back then... I converted it to MP3 so it could play on my MP3 player. Thanks for bringing back memories.
I want one thing for Millenials & Zoomers to understand... we early internet users wanted 1 thing... PRIVACY, to be anonymous, & use AVATARS to hide behind while we shared UNCENSORED information!! All of this has been taken from us & now people are walking around IRL as those avatars. I dated a 23 y/o (I'm 44) & she wondered why my snapchat avatar had green hair. She literally YELLED at me because it "didn't look like me" & "it's supposed to." No... that's not why we invented all of this. You're running around IRL with green hair. The pretend world is the online world you live out fantasies there so you don't have to be wild IRL. You're doing it backwards. IDK how we got here but the censorship is gone, Alexa spies on you, all the TOS have signed away your rights. Please... the internet is already destroyed. Fight for it back. There is still time in your lifetime before it's too late.
I'm a huge computer nerd, and that computer doesn't look like a genuine IBM XT. It looks like a clone case which were popular to use with XT and AT motherboards. That monitor also isn't a genuine IBM but a clone. With no logos on either of them, im pretty much sure it's just a generic clone. With the amount of clones from small companies which were trying to get in on the home computer craze of the 80s and 90s, it's pretty much impossible to figure out what computer it exactly is. Just my 2 cents, nice video either way
I went to high school with a lot of computer nerds (SF Bay Area,) back in the mid and early 80's.. Peter Thiel even went to my high school (San Mateo High). Back then we had computer clubs in high school.... usually had Apple II's and mostly the black "Bell and Howell" ones.. I also had a BBS (pre-internet model connection) that I rand from my house.. we had a guy in our nerd group by the name of Bill Rockafellar (RIP Dozer)... he looked exactly like this guy... not likely him as Bill didn't smoke.. That computer on his desk in the pic is an IBM PC/XT, circa 1981-83.. I doubt it's taken in the late 80's, more likely mid 80's... The printer also looks like an Epson dot matrix, maybe RX-80... I Had a PC/XT with a 10MB HD and a. Hayes 1200 (external) model, BTW, I was born in 1969
yeah too much filler such as showing source for image copies that weren't even the oldest he found and quite obviously not any real source of the photo...
I haven't even finished this video yet but one thing I learned is that most of those pre/early internet 'shoops' were just scans of old magazines or high quality, wholesale prints released online at some point. Basically professional ad services made most of them or professional photo shoot creators.
@@belstar1128 When I first used the internet (1995) there were scanners around, so you could easily scan any photo ant put it on the internet. This particular photo is also from 90s.
I'm absolutely sure that I first came across the basement nerd photo in 1995/96. Had my own copy, but lost a huge quantity of material when my two new Seagate Barracuda external drives corrupted. Enjoyable episode.
Pat, this guy always reminded me of a fellow student in Montreal at Cégep du Vieux Montréal This is a college (CEGEP) in Quebec province in Canada. He was a friend of mine in 1991/92 He was a real nerd, no friends but me and my girlfriend. His name is Benoit if I remember correctly. He was in computer programming first semester. I’m 58 so this is a long time ago. If I remember other things I’ll let you know.
Reminds me of a search I went on for a few pieces of music from my childhood. Some songs from the rare Laserdisc release of the anime: Tenchi Muyo. I eventually after about 5 years of searching, realized I had them all along, from a copy of the show on VHS my dad was given from a friend in college. I already had most of the soundtrack, but now I have the songs I was missing.
Even though you had not succeeded in uncovering the mystery, I would still like to thank you for a trip to the early days of the Internet. First time I got online was around 2007. Still early enough to remember the IRCs, lolcats, advice animals, shoop da whoop etc, but not nearly that early to see those endearing and quirky personal webpages. So, warm thanks for taking me down the memory lane. It really were simpler times.
You may want to contact Dan Bornstein the creator of Wall-o-Shame, who has been around on the Internet since its inception. I'm confident he might be able to shine some light on this "nerd" photo.
When I used to work with Mark he told me he was surprised nobody tracked him down after seeing an old photo of him went viral. I havent talked to him in a while
I've never seen that picture before 5 minutes ago when I saw this vid in my recommended list. From the thumbnail, I actually thought this was going to tell us more about the "I don't care that you broke your elbow" kid who lives rent-free in my head.
@@WormAteWords Yup, getting the floppy disk size wrong when its obvious they are not 3.5` from the box size alone is a huge red flag pointing to poor research. The xt had 5.25` drives as standard and the smaller ones were not used on such machines. Im guessing the picture was from the early 90s when dot matrix printers were everywhere and a relatively old pc like the one in the picture would be reasonably cheap to buy on the used market for hobbyist use.
Been wondering when the next vid was gonna be, this did not disappoint! I love niche internet history, and have wondered about this image myself. I also wonder what the origin of that one clown sitting at computer is lol
I just googled Computer basement nerd And the first image result is from KnowYourMeme. If you click that image, the first related image is a newer picture of the same man.
I think the rumors of a picture of the same guy from a different angle are just instances of the same photo horizontally flipped and/or cropped. But the composite image including a picture of the same man older appears to possibly be legitimate.
I'm pretty sure I found the original imgur page that would have been used in the reddit post 11 years ago. The entire time I was searching for the second image for some reason it now just randomly pops up. Edit: although tbh I'm not 100% convinced it's the same person. I have my doubts, but I do think this is the post being referred to on reddit
thanks for NOt sharing eve´s old page link tho :(, I wanted to play her song but Im too dumb to find it, I tried with your steps but failed miserably, now the jocks gonna bully me again
![CAMPปลิ้น | EP.83[1/2] เปิดแคมป์หลอนต้อนรับ 2 ตัวพ่อแห่งวงการผี!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2uPuHYHgwiI/mqdefault.jpg)
(UPDATE) The photo mentioned from reddit is in fact real,a̶n̶d̶ h̶a̶s̶ b̶e̶e̶n̶ u̶n̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶e̶d̶. T̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ t̶h̶e̶ s̶a̶m̶e̶ i̶m̶g̶u̶r̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ l̶i̶n̶k̶e̶d̶ i̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ r̶e̶d̶d̶i̶t̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ m̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶e̶d̶ b̶y̶ t̶h̶e̶ u̶s̶e̶r̶ j̶o̶o̶e̶s̶ h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶//i̶m̶g̶u̶r̶.c̶o̶m̶/E̶V̶f̶Z̶4̶
I found the exact reddit thread www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/kkcc6/update/
p̶.s̶ w̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ I̶'m̶ n̶o̶t̶ 1̶0̶0̶%̶ s̶u̶r̶e̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ s̶a̶m̶e̶ p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶, I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ m̶y̶ d̶o̶u̶b̶t̶s̶ a̶l̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ i̶t̶'s̶ a̶ v̶e̶r̶y̶ c̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ m̶a̶t̶c̶h̶. I̶ d̶o̶ 1̶0̶0̶%̶ b̶e̶l̶i̶e̶v̶e̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ i̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ p̶o̶s̶t̶ b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶a̶l̶k̶e̶d̶ a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ r̶e̶d̶d̶i̶t̶.
It isn't him like I had figured, it's another man by the name of Tim Madison
p.s.s yes the "more recent" image is now literally one of the first related images on google, something changed since this videos posting I can promise you it wasn't there prior to this videos posting.
(Videos Mentioned)
The internet Is Dying - th-cam.com/video/mr026OIMYRE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NNPnfR4x1cfTZ5YC
Google Search Decay, Internet Rot - th-cam.com/video/vwVFzY8XqIo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=86QQRam3LYvYvKKI
Olda'vista - th-cam.com/video/HpSYLD1xHPE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=e23qKchPEFaR_6hN
@augustschiffli7482 rip gamer, it's not the same person.
@@patratrick are we *sure* that isn’t? Cus fuck man that shit is extremely convincing, or maybe it’s just me seeing the walls look the same and my mind is just convincing me it is
That post has someone saying it is prof. larry hill whom teaches at RIT. might be worth looking into.
@@themoongateofficial OP said it wasn't him
@@FlamSings that's most likely who it is
14 years and i just now notice he had a cig in his hand lol
Lol same! I never noticed he was smoking!
fr
jpg quality wasn't crisp enough to see
@@azzyzun1478Also the bottom text could hide that too
Ew you were born in 2010
I don't know why, but the revelation that he's smoking Newports makes this image funnier.
Crisp menthol cigarettes
chester stone
*Motherfucking newports*
They have it! Motherfucking newports!! -squidward
even more of a legend...
He looks like an adult and a kid at the same time. A truly unique looking human.
Since I was around back then, I am guessing he is like 16. At most he is a freshman in college about 19.
He was built different
Manbaby Gaming
Yes. I just stared at this photo for awhile and when it came out I remembered him as either morbidly obese or extremely frail. I notice now he’s not extremely overweight (not by today’s standards) and has oddly impressionable muscle definition. As if he were to go outside and lift weights he wouldn’t look nerdy.
Then I move to the face and the horror sets in.
in germany he is called a kauzig, i heard its because they have an owl that is small and odd that they call the same
Those Disk Boxes are for 5 1/4" floppy disks, not 3.5 disks
🤓☝️ ... Jk ty for your knowledge
@@UserUser-zc6fxI was going in the comments to see if someone has pointed this out yet: the 5.25” were used with XTs (my dad had a XT for years…with a whopping 30MB hard drive). However, since 5.25” disks continued to be used on through the 90s….the picture probably is from mid to late 80s.
@@dsr0116 Can confirm. I've used the XT and clearly remember the 5 1/4.
Yup... Hard to NOT see that. They are huge compared to 3,5.
@@dsr0116 Damn, I'm old... when I was a kid I had the XT 😢
I used to be a huge fan of a Japanese singer. I would scour the internet for hours on certain days looking for any older material about them from the 90’s I could find and save it because I had learned about link rot and lost media stuff.(I still have all of this media to this day)
One day my search led me to an old angelfire website of another fan who at the time impressively knew about stuff going on in Japan at the time and had acquired magazines, interviews, and etc that they scanned and uploaded to their angelfire page.
They had an old email that I tried to message because I had become enamored with this website and this person. I felt like I had met another fan I felt I could really connect to. Unfortunately they never emailed back so I assume they abandoned the email address but to this day I look back on that website/day and wonder what they’re doing now, if they’re still a fan, etc.
I really miss the old internet and I’m glad I got to experience it myself before it died off.
Idk why but the internet from the past felt more big and with better quality, i always found what i was searching or i find pages like yoi are describing. Nie if you try to find something you will encounter BS content.
Who was the singer?
x2
@@rikiishitoru8885 T.M.Revolution
@@rikiishitoru8885T.M.Revolution
I'll save you 30 minutes of your life, he doesn't find out who the Smoking Nerd is.
imagine how many minutes of his life he spent
the hunt is still on
Darn.
🤝
🙏
In fact, with the internet today, the amount of lost information is higher as ever. I was told the internet never forgets, but 99% of data on the internet just disappears over time.
Truly. I randomly decided to google myself the other day, as one does when it randomly comes to mind lmfao. Compared to the last time, which had to have been like 7 years ago, there is one, single, solitary article about me, and all of the non-text content is link-rotted away. Its... kind of crazy. My mom made me be very involved with the local community when I was young, so there was a lot there once upon a time. Now, its all gone. There isn't even anything about my graduating class from highschool left, and that was only 11 years ago. I'm not bothered by the lack of acknowledgement or anything, its just kind of fascinating to see how fast the internet moves on?
@BT-ex7ko It's funny how all the good stuff you do; community service, helping the elderly, starting a business, etc. gets lost, but you trip and fall at the mall that _one time_ and the CCTV files are there forever!
😂
Indeed, took me 2 weeks to find a game i played on my smartphone back in 2013-2014 "Cyberlords Arcology", saddest part, when i bought it, i instantly refunded 5$, cuz it was not worth it and i play better games on PS1 emul. My point is, i tried similar wording, categories, shit even year of release, but all for nothing, until my brain dug out archives and reminded me the full name of the game.
The Internet never forgets, but the people using it do. And sometimes all that knew forget where they kept their information.
That and it gets removed, usually without warning.
internet never forgets... when you are famous and make racist comments. thats the whole thing.
The real smoking nerd was rhe friends we made along the way
Yes😂
rhe
And this gun I found
Never realized he was smoking until this comment
Yea, smoking was the shit for decades. fw it
The floppies were 5 1/4" not 3 1/2" because of the box size. The computer monitor (and likely the computer) is an IBM clone, not an actual IBM. There were a lot of companies importing blatant IBM XT knockoffs, and putting their badge on it. The printer is the tech to try to date in the photo. The printer is a Panasonic (probably KX-P1150), and that printer was shown in advertisements in 1989 and 1990. The phone jack box means that it is likely in the US. The cigarettes don't help since Newport packaging looked like that for decades. Beyond that info, it's just a nearsighted (yes you can tell this from the photo) guy in his 30s who wore polyester.
You're absolutely right about the floppy size. Just the relative size of the box to the rest of the computer. And all of the 3M boxes looked like that back then; That I can remember clearly.
And I think the KX-P1180 is a closer match.
Yes the printer in the photo is a Panasonic KX-P1180. It was released in 1990.
My thoughts exactly that PC is a clone, just doesn’t quite match IBM. Young folks dont realize how literal “clone” could be in those days
This is a 16-18 year old Kid in 1990
long time ago, before the pandemic , someone posted a photo in a different angle of the guy with the same computer, but its was like one those post you just read and say nice and proceed to the next post without salving it.
I looked for this for days, I swear I couldn't find any trace of it on reddit. If anyone ends up finding it though that'd be incredible.
It’s been found, I have my suspicions it isn’t actually him.
But no doubt this is the image shared around reddit.
@@Marchers46 youtube doesn't allow links in comments anymore I think.
@@DD_Vandal you can just by pas it by doing one of these "example(.)link/funny"
@@DD_Vandal you can just by pas it by doing one of these "example(.)link/funny"
"once you put something on the internet its there forever."
linkrot: are you sure about that?
Yeah but if something goes even a little viral then its instantly even harder to get rid off and will take much longer.
Gen Z dude discovers what it was like to surf the web. Every page was part of a "web ring", where each user linked to pages they liked, and on those pages you found links to pages _they_ liked, so on and so forth. The first search engines were indexed automatically, but hand tagged and curated. We didn't have the problem of "spam links" back then, where you search for something and the first 10 results are AI generated garbage drowning in ads. And everyone who had the technical know-how to build a web page was a nerd, so everyone who put up a web page was doing it like they were speaking directly to their own people. It felt very candid and intimate, despite the separation by wires. Anyway, the likelihood of finding the actual source of this photo is almost zero. A scanned photograph, likely from the late 80s, probably originally posted by someone's kid or nephew to their geocities page a decade later as a joke, downloaded and reposted without attribution a billion times.
Back in the 90s I would often start on someone's web page on something like geocities, follow their links to another page and so on. You'd end up trawling through weird and wonderful personal pages and end up on something totally unlike where you started but see a lot of interesting stuff along the way.
@@stackhat8624 And then you'd save those neat finds to your own page. The old internet was in a lot of ways both better and worse. It was harder to find things but the things you found were often very useful because people were making those pages purely for the love of it because nobody ever had any thoughts of getting famous or making money. I had a small paintball page where I'd share tips and modifications and I'd get thanks from all over the world which I thought was just the best thing ever when I was 14.
@@stackhat8624About the same experience on sites like Neocities today!
Me just now realising I was subliminally missing web rings bc most most mainstream sites are like cul de sacs and deadends now.
I think the guy who scanned and posted this originally, is dead. I feel like they'd still be around and pop up somewhere to solve the mystery.
This video made me realize how much I miss the simpler era of the Internet
Yeah. I'm also missing the time before big, moderated business driven platforms started using our attention as currency. Back then, we happily wasted our time for free :)
@@AlbertTheLaine It's still out there. I've degoogled and had a blast online today! Websites I had forgotten about came up! And I actually clicked a top link because it was what I was searching for and not a sponsored ad :D! Even blog sites got straight to the point and I didn't waste seconds scrolling to find answers and remedies. It was a satisfying. And I hope I can do it again tomorrow :).
I miss the WinXP internet era :(
If you're still looking for this image, I have old memories about this image from early 2000s, like around 2000-2005... I am from Finland and I've seen this image circulated way before Reddit existed, mostly in IRC channels. I have a strong memory of hearing / reading about this image at some point later, and that the person is confirmed to be Finnish. But my memory is incredibly faded.
Anyway, it might be worth checking out people who are familiar with old Finnish IRC/demo party/Assembly oldheads who were around in early 2000s. I was pretty young back then, so my memories aren't very strong.
Yeah to me this picture is also associated with Demoscene. I think if one were to ask slengpung curators, they might have an idea. I sometimes prod Gargaj when i'm trying to remember something from the 90s to mid 2000s, he has crazy memory.
Codename Eagle, Battlefield 1942
for some reason this photo is somehow related to future crew in my mind, think it was some conversation I had with strobe or summat like a decade ago and probably isn't actually related specifically to future crew. might be a good point of reference for the youtuber if he sees this, though.
@@SianaGearz Wooow! Slengpung! 😄Haven't heard that name in YEARS!
I also have a feeling this is from finland, and i also think he looks like finnish person. I might have seen it on kuvaton or early "lauta" forums that are basically finnish 4chan clones.
The song by Eve really brough tears to my eyes
unironically, i have always wanted to make obscure arts and such just so people can find it on the internet years later. This is really inspiring
Sexy suzy is kind of a banger idk
Some rich tycoon finds your stuff online and wants to pay you millions for it - only to find you died 5 years previous. 😂😢
a n i m e
n
i
m
e
@NarwahlGaming basically Van Gogh
a n i m e
n m
i i
m n
e m i n a
We used to pass this image around on IRC back in the mid 1990s. There was a running joke that it was this one guy in EFNET #emu, but I am fairly certain it wasn't. Anything you're finding while scouring the modern web, even through old archive searches like you were doing, is unfortunately not going to give you many clues about it's origins. Wherever this first came from, it was likely uploaded in places that are definitely not archived anywhere, unless someone out there still had 3 decade old IRC logs/newgroup posts/bbs logs/or some similar early internet message or bulletin board system. Interesting video! Gave me some good 90s internet nostalgia. Makes me wish I could remember the name of my old Geocities website to see if I could still find it on an archive, I really want to look at low res images of ska bands while listening to movie theme MIDI files on the embedded player right next to my view counter.
Might find it in Usenet archives from the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if this image also have passed through the usenet and/or some old Fidonet nodes.
The printer is a Panasonic KX-P1180. It was released in 1990. So i think it was taken in the 1990s. Some time.
nice one
prolly right at 90 , def. early 90s though.
The Panasonic KX-P1180 dot matrix printer was released in 1989, not 1990. It was known for its reliability and affordability, commonly used in businesses and home offices during that time. Originally costing $299.99 back in 1989, this would be equivalent to approximately $745.14 in 2024 dollars.
@@aexetanius damn... inflation
@@aexetanius And there were previous Panasonic models - that looks like an 1180 to me too....
For anyone confused by the early 2000 "anti-jock" webpage. This came after the Columbine shootings and many news outlets claimed "jocks" bullying "nerds" and "geeks" was going to erupt into more violence and shootings.
Not only that, being considered a nerd was significantly more stigmatised. Like comics, (non sports) games, computers, etc. now is significantly more mainstream and socially acceptable than back around the 2000's. It's also why music genre's like nerdcore became a thing and pretty much died out when nerd culture became more mainstream.
Even long before columbine you already had this "nerd is someone socially unacceptable especially by jocks", commonly emphasised in movies. Movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" fully banked on this, a movie trope that doesn't really work anymore in the modern age.
I remember at around this time, how self-proclaimed geeks would point out the difference between geek and nerd. Like a geek was someone with weird interests or academically gifted, but retained some social skills and standards of hygiene, whereas nerds had no social skills and didn't shower. Or something like that. Moot point these days, after the rush of insta pics of girls buying non-prescription glasses and claiming "I'm such a nerd 🤓lol".
@@relo999 I find it hilarious you put the cart before the horse. The movies introduced that shit. Valley Girl speech spread because of the 1. the movie 2. Frank Zappa's "parody" (promotion) song She's A Valley Girl.
Humans are malleable clumps of mud.
The old internet was truely a wild wasteland and this is what missing from it now
True, i can only describe the feeling of the internet during the early 90s as the wild west. No clear frontiers, no law & order, no huge controller over it - no urbanization.
better times.
I've seen that picture so many times but it wasn't until this video that I realized he was smoking in it lmao
his keyboard must've been so stinky
@@mj.l It's the 80s/90s. Everyone smoked.
@@johnlee7164 I remember during my childhood throughout the early to late 90s people smoked everywhere, I remember people smoking in busses, planes and resturaunts. It really did feel like every adult smoked back then.
@@armchairgeneralissimoI was 13 when I started smoking back then. They started enforcing ID at the counter when I was 16, so I hit the old vending machines, or found a spot and bought cartons which were also cheaper than by the pack. By 1992, most guys were doing Skoal bandits, dip, or chew instead of cigarettes.
Bet this guy was like 16 in the photo
And the vertical white power cable in the back resembles a slight trail of smoke drifting upwards... Now you can't unsee it.
Ngl the cig in hand makes him look kinda badass
Yeah smokin is cool
@@patratrick cancer is not, but fuck yeah the aesthetic of smoking is , just hate that it comes with that addictive shit too 😂
True, i never saw the cigarrette before. And now thr guy looks truly badass
Cigarettes are LAME.
He's the tech guy who the hero recruits in a movie. Super antisocial and rough around the edges but incredibly intelligent, joins the hero not because he wants to save the day but because of the thrill of solving a completely unprecedented technological problem.
I was also a Taringa user years ago, I used to download tons of music in mp3 format there (illegally, of course). In those music searches, I sometimes came to pages like those of Eve Anderson, Angelfire-like pages, I remember in particular one with Korn memorabilia and stuff like that.
I'd never heard of Taringa before this (being an English speaking American) I feel like I'd oughta dive into it more. I loved how during the early internet days different countries, and languages would have their own sites with their own meme culture that'd somethings bleed into others. I.E like leak spin, and trololo. I'm sure there's probably something I didn't know that came from taringa.
@@patratrick Not Argentinian, but a Latina none the less. I have Taringa
to thank for making me aware of OverClocked ReMix for example, still following to this day
@@patratrick Taringa was one of the most popular pages on the Spanish-speaking side of the internet. So many stories came from that site. I remember they used to come up with their own slang words, and everybody would use them; some of them are still used to this day.
I'm currently studying computer science, and every teacher I had told us stories of them downloading stuff from Taringa, taking so long that they had to leave the computer on all night.
The story that I remember the most was of a guy who, after not seeing his father for 19 years (he abandoned him at 6), asked for help on the site, and they ended up finding where he lived. The guy went there, but his father had already passed away. However, he ended up talking to his father's family.
The history of Taringa is not documented at all in English, so it's a fun rabbit hole if you are interested. I recommend the video by Che Juanse, 'La complicada historia de Taringa!'. Turn on the auto-translated subtitles; they do a pretty good job for the most part, except when they translate slang words.
bro confessing his crime
@@tommarnt What you gonna do, snitch to the RIAA or something?
FWIW I have the photo in my /b/ folder, dated Dec 12 2004. That feller was an old-/b/ favorite.
The people in the party van want to have a look at that folder. 😄
Hey, I just wanted to add something to your lore on the Smoking Nerd image.
I started high school in 2003 and began the Web Club with a close friend, making websites using Microsoft Front Page. I was probably maintaining my site sometime between 2003 and 2007. During that time, I used the picture of the Smoking Nerd, though I don't recall the context.
The only reason I remember this is because the Smoking Nerd was the first "funny" image I had seen in more than one place. As in, I saw it on the internet, uploaded it to my site, and then some time later, saw it somewhere else.
It's really hard to describe the scarcity of content back then. There were a few major hubs, like Newgrounds, where content would filter through. But if you didn't see something in a place, like Newgrounds, it was unlikely you would see it somewhere else.
I can't tell you when I reuploaded the image. I would say it's unlikely I used it in 2003. Probably '04 at the absolute earliest.
yeah back then we didnt have like centralized hubs like reddit or even facebook, everything was on old school forums. and there were so damn many of them, not only that some of them didnt even allow linking images or hosting imanges it was litterally all text.
even back in 06 i only used a few myself, like gamespot game faqs. chat planet and cheat code central and they all catered to different content.
I absolutely remember sharing this photo some time between 2006 - 2008.
There is a reverse image searcher that uses facial recognition AI to find other images of the same person. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was called but it was used to identify the man in the "Find Satoshi" ARG
@mediabin1771 Not sure if the name is familiar to me, but that's probably it
@mediabin1771 It seems to be paid though
@@VY_Canis_Majoris I wonder if people will use it for even older art pieces online? 😅
pimeyes
Yandex?
oh, he didn't find it
Those hours he spent need to get monetized
he got further than anybody else. but he had a huge missed oppritunity, the oldest upload he could find was still up but the website was borked. by messing with the URL he may have been able to get into some folders or another page by changing the URL to something else. also something he never did was check the actual meta data of each picture as there may have been more info there. it would have been as simple as right clicking the picture and going to properties, sometimes theres extra information there that you never knew about.
That old meme appears in several books and magazines. I'm pretty sure a soft cover tv guide or movie guide book had that image in it as an ad insert for the computer or something computer-related.
Come over here and kiss me
The computer/monitor/peripherals is just some IBM XT clone, not an original. Incredibly common for the day. They also used the same 3M packaging for the 5.25" line, and 5.25" drives were way more common for these machines.
This was a trip to the times of the old internet and why we may never had a result for the pic and the guy on it, sure was a ride on seeing history of old internet and the people in there
ALSO: RIP Taringa, you we're too beautiful for this world and thanks to you i discovered creepypastas as a young kid on the internet
Oh that's dope, someone in my audience used to use taringa. Glad I could bring some memories back, that was sort of the goal.
Thanks for reminding Taringa, unfortunately the site closed after the owners sell the website to crypto bros who were just interested in profit instead of focusing in listening to the community and never fixed bugs who prevented people to post original content. The site in his prime was one of the most popular websites from Latin America until social media arrived
I had to AskJeeves about Taringa. 😂
@@patratrick almost everyone in latin america used it in some way. It was very famous back in the day
I'm pretty sure those are 5.25" floppy disks, not 3.5".
You're probably right, I couldn't find a 5 1/4 inch with the same packaging while making this video. The size was throwing me off, but the packaging matched the 3.5. Just saw a listing for a 5 1/4 with the same packaging.
Doesn't change much, aside from throwing the image date back a couple of years.
@@patratrick Yeah, it's only a detail! Loved the video, great work!! Cheers.
@@patratrick It's a pretty ancient computer and nobody would bother putting 3.5" drives on it when anything that came on 3.5" disks would need a more powerful computer anyway. XT case form factor also did not stick around very long so throwing a motherboard upgrade into it was not common.
@@patratrick nah man 5 and 1/4 floppies were used into the early 90s, i know because i used em and i have a drive that takes them dated 1994. the 3.5" floppies were around in the mid to late 80s but they were still really expensive compared to the bigger ones.
@@NozomuYumeThat has nothing to do with it. It's simply not the format those systems were equipped with.
man, eve's webpage is precious
plot twist: the nerd in the polaroid picture is Eve's father and she was the one who originally uploaded the picture
Is it on the Wayback machine?
Man I miss the old internet... so simple and so cool
Knowing that almost half the links cited in supreme court documents are broken is a sobering thought, and further proof that we need to archive the history of the internet.
The internet in 1995 was by the people mostly. Companies had just caught on. It was a great time. It felt like reading the diary of strangers.
Such websites just no longer exist.
And everyone online (at least everyone making their own websites) was somewhat intelligent. Everyone was willing to share information. I learned more from the early internet than anywhere else in life. The same level of information is not easy to find anymore. General low level info, sure. Plenty of dis-info. But not much advanced technical info. (The internet basically taught me electrical engineering.. a lot more too. But, w/out any schooling, I can design circuits, print boards, make very good complete products.)
they exist just less common
I think an important reason to that might be that the early internet wasn't accessible to just anyone. These sites would be accessed mostly by tech-passionate people like themselves so people were more likely to share personal info there. These days it's way too easy to dox someone, create a deepfake video or audio from whatever you put on the internet...
I'm really sad that the Internet Wayback Machine stopped including AngelFire URLs a year or two ago. Up until then I was actually able to see the first website I ever made back in the late 90s, which consisted of a story about a date I went on where the girl crashed her car, an anime page where I had my own AKIRA-inspired fanfiction, and a tutorial on how to shaboink a Sockem Bopper inflatable boxing glove. I was a teenager, so...
Honestly while everyone else used that guy's image to make fun of nerds, I always thought he looked like a cool guy. But that's because I am a nerd, huddling around a computer with other nerds chain-smoking and fiddling with some game or other software was how I spent my young adult years.
Yes, totally agree! I thought the same.
I saw this image even in the late 90's on usenet groups (been online since 1995) with 1998 being the earliest I can even remember, and even in the early 90's those XT machine were still popular due to them being cheaper than newer 386/486 machines. He looks like he hosted or was a user of a BBS group(s). Those systems could not use Compuserve, AOL, or Prodigy which were starting to get people "online".
Came here to post exactly this. I remember this was around '98 or '99 when I was still in high school.
I'm kind of sure that this scanned picture was transferred through some IRC server back in the early days just after BBS era.
@@enlathxaind178 You may be right. I just recalled my earliest time seeing the keyboard warrior so it may have circulated there too way earlier on IRC. Heck for all we know it may have been originally posted on AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy. I never had those three so I would not know for sure.
Using Yandex, the name James(Karl) Renner popped up more than once. Sadly died in 2023 at the age of 71...
I wonder. His pic in obituary DOES look similar.
@@davedavedave8929 To be honest, I really doubt it's the same person. The different hair and pictures from similar time period make it unlikely. On the reverse image search, there's a writer/journalist with the same name(without Karl) with similar facial features(without glasses). Hard to say if there's a true connection or another "red herring".
@@beepster991 Yeah the Ears and Hair are completely different
Looking at the photo of James Renner's obiturary I would say they're different people. I just can't see someone going from having curly hair that looks like it would naturally grow out into an afro having their hair straightened and cut by a blind barber.
Good on you for searching though.
@@armchairgeneralissimo The man from the obituary was a bit of a joke due to similarities when searching the "James Renner" name. When searched from the picture, a few websites linked it to a writer/journalist of the same name. Not sure if done for humor or if this person really identify himself as the "Nerd".
The eve part of your video was genuinely wholesome and poignant making me tear up a bit remembering and reminiscing about a simpler time in my life so thank you
Eve is now an Author and a very accomplished academian and engineer!
A N I M E
N
I
M
E
Everybody's gangsta until a nerd smoking Newport shows up
Those are 5.25" disk boxes, not 3.5".
True. 3M used similar box art for both sizes (5.25" and 3.5"), but the box dimensions are way different for those sizes.
was reading through the commends and patratrick the guy who did the video was made aware and he responded to people telling him that. doesnt matter though as the date he gave in the video for the picture 1985-1990 is still very valid as both 3.5 and 5.25 disks were available in the same time frame.
You beat me to it, I was about to comment that :P
@@thelasthallow In the long run, it didn't make a difference, but that's a bit of a fallacy. The cigarettes were around in 1985-1990 as well, but the cigarettes were around well before 1985. So were 5.25" floppies. They were around long before the 3.5 and the original XTs came with 5.25" discs. If that picture had been taken in 1982, and he limited his search to 1985, it would have hurt his chances of finding it.
In the end, it's a minor difference, but if you want to use something to date a picture, best to do even the smallest amount of checking to make sure you're not off by half a decade.
Cheers to all.
@@BillBinder Someone in this comment section said the printer is a Panasonic model, either KX-P1150 introduced in 1989 or KX-P1180, introduced in 1990.
Bro really did 40+6 on Google calculator 💀
I saw that and went straight to the comments.
Not everybody are good at maths you know.
@@jag0937eb
Not everybody is good at grammar either.
He probably did it to trigger people like you.
I do it without even thinking cuz I’m so caught up in my work, after I click the equal sign I just think “did I actually just do that?”
"So, I did the unthinkable: I made a reddit" had me on the ground. You've earned my sub
🙄🙄
Interesting video. Always been curious about that guy myself.
But there is one thing from the early days of the internet you forgot since it's not really much of a thing anymore. E-Mail.
In 2002 I was in the Air Force and deployed to the Middle East. At the time, most people in my squadron still only had their government E-Mail. Most didn't have personal accounts.
But one thing we did with our E-Mail was pictures and funny stories. Most times, over half my inbox was just friends sending out funny pictures. And this was one of them. Our First Sergent legit looked like a female version of this guy, so someone printed out the picture and taped it to her door. She laughed it off and it stayed there the rest of the deployment.
A lot of pics from that time period were never actually put online that much. They got around from people E-mailing them to friends and family. So there really is no way to track them after a certain point unless someone comes forward. And given some of the memes and jokes made about him and this pic, I couldn't blame him if he never did.
Also, those aren't 3 1/2 inch floppies, they're the older 5 1/4. Grew up playing Oregon Trail on them in school.
Was very happy to see a notification for your video pop up! Very interesting stuff that I wasn't expecting
Hope you enjoyed it! My little break is over, and I'm going to be experimenting with what content I put out.
you got a little sidetracked here
a little ? 😂
Not sure I've seen one of these "what's the origin of..." videos that doesn't actually find it. I've been spoiled by that pair of Skull Trumpet videos from Jeffiot...
An interesting video nonetheless, but I did spend the whole time you were talking about Eve wondering if her site secretly contained the photo, and you'd reveal it was her father or something.
I think everyone wishes you could just find the solution. It'd make a better video for sure, but sometimes it's not possible. I empathized the journey, and hoped someone could get something out of that journey like I did. Also opens a discussion for my capable investigators to maybe finish the work I've started, or add onto the mystery.
Something I couldn't find during my search, but now the video is out.
imgur.com/EVfZ4 here's the imgur post that's likely the source of the reddit rumor. Still not sure it's legitimate, but I can almost guarantee this is the imgur post being discussed on reddit.
tbh he should've just shared his progress in a post or smth, so someone else could find it
I used Mario Paint to analyze the photos ( bet you didn't know it could do that!) and I am 51% sure those are the same nose.
Yeah this is no Michaelsoft Binbows saga, is it?
I used that image around 2004, on a stock market message board! I claimed it was me in my parent's basement, daytrading while chain smoking. BTW, this image was from the BBS dial up days, pre internet. I estimate it is from 1988. I had a very similar rig, 1mb RAM, 20MB miniscribe hard drive. You had to use a modem and dial a number to the host computer, at 2400 baud using a program like Telex. US Robotics modem. I once had an operator scold me for uploading a 700K image that used up a bunch of his storage, and took hours!
Started with punch cards, in case you're wondering, VAX mainframe, and not dead yet for 50 years😂
best comment here
No, it's from 90s. The printer on this image (Panasonic KX-P1191) was released in 1989, and I doubt that it's brand new. BTW I also used US Robotics and Telex (I even remember, that it was written by a Romanian programmer) to dial up BBSs in mid-90s. But started in 1991 with custom made ZX Spectrum clone "Leningrad-1", which I soldered and assembled by myself - in the Soviet Union you had to make your own computer if you wanted to have one :-)
@@saszab i was reading through comments and i saw some guy say it was someone called stephan wilke? I looked at images of him and he looks similar tbf but do you think this is a troll?
@@NienNunbOnly Just googled him - no, he doesn't look like the guy from this photo. But yesterday I found another person, which looks almost exactly the same. Google "Unidentified man at an IBM System" in quotes :-)
So, was the photo
Kim Basinger, or
Kelly LeBrock? :)
P.S. Joke from a Rifftraxed movie!
As a Taringa! user back then, I chuckled when I unexpectedly saw a reference to the site of one of the early usages of this image.
That Mr bean website looks like a YTMND
i completely forgot about ytmnd
@@7take93 the old days of laughing ur ass off with ur freinds at “nick ga stole m y bike”
Literally the first thing I thought of.
Something doesn't add up here. You could take any random photo of any random person, even decades old, put it on the internet, and by the time it reached half the notoriety of THIS nerd pic, I can pretty much guarantee people would pop up who would claim to have sth to do with it, trying to cash in on the fame. It was taken before the age of digital photography, and people didn't usually develop their photos in those days. So there had to be at least one other human being who might identify it's author at the very least. And what about friends? Family? Relatives. School bullies?! We take photos in order to show them to somebody. Today almost anyone who isn't literal 100 is on the Internet, so there is just no way none of them ever found out how famous this photograph has become. So unless this nerd was killed in some tragic accident shortly after this photo was taken, and so did his entire neighbourhood and family, there must still be some folks out there who can shed some light on this mystery!
Not a bad point. Interesting.
Even if you were to find the first upload of the image to the internet, there's no guarantee you'd be able to tell it was the first upload. What's more, considering the nature of the earlier days of the internet and memes, its possible whoever uploaded the picture isn't even the one in it. They may not even know the full story themselves, depending on who this person is to them (for all we know, its a picture of a friend's relative or something, but even the original uploader might not know for sure.)
Still, I think this kind of investigation is worth doing simply for investigation's sake. We were all told growing up that the internet was forever, that things posted there would always be around. I think its important for people to realize just how untrue that is, and how important it is to preserve what's important to you...Even if its something like an embarrassing picture of a nerd smoking.
Growing up and learning "the internet is forever" was a lie is heart breaking lol.
I feel like there's so many thing you just kind of have to search for (regardless of probability of finding it) because who knows you might find something long lost that's on the verge of going away forever.
@@patratrick True, the journey can be much more important than the destination after all. Internet anthropology is a subject I really love. Even if we don't find what we set out for, there's so much out there worth remembering.
this video is making very nostalgic, the world felt so new and it felt like there were possibilities around every corner. It didnt feel so hopeless as it is today. I miss it
The internet promised freedom, hope, opportunity, options, choices ... and not to be a total doomer it has in many ways. Many things that were a pain or nuisance, like lodging a tax return, are now easy. But most of the conveniences were in place by the early 2010s. Since the mid 2015s and the take over of social media the internet has become more a prison or at least a doubled edged sword.
scrolling thru old forums is one of my favorite things to do. As a teenager myself, seeing the simple times of the internet is very intriguing
You're wrong about the floppies, but, first ..
Man, I feel like that image is just about the OG. Pretty sure it predates later stuff like Advice Dog, or Cheese Pizza (as a meme, duh), all that kind of stuff. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I DL'd that image from friggen USENET. Or even a BBS. That sh&t am old. Pure classic!
As for his machine, that's a very early PC, looks almost like it could even be an actual IBM. The monitor in particular looks exactly like the OG monitor from a 5150 or XT. Those are very definitely 5 1/4" floppies, and NOT 3 1/2"s, because those probably weren't out at that time, and there's no sign his machine has 3 1/2" drives. Compare the height of the boxes with the height of the machine they're sitting next to -- those are 5 1/4"s, mate. (The IBM PC case was about 5 1/2" tall, sez Wikipedia.) Prolly doesn't even have a hard drive -- if it does, it's no more that 20 megabytes, and takes up a ton of room. That computer could be as old as '81 or '82, imho. Even the keyboard looks like one of those majestic IBM beauties that everyone wanted, back in that day.
The monitor looks like it could be a Goldstar MBM 2015. Has the same basic shape. The same 3 knobs. And a black badge in the same place. At least from pictures I found they seem to be from 1987.
@@gswanson Yeah I remember there being several brands that tried to look close enough to the actual IBM product that you'd think it was IBM product, if you just glanced in the door of an office as you walked by but if you looked close, there were little differences. I mean, if this were an IBM monitor, the badge should be clearly readable.
But I was mostly concerned with clearing up the mistake about the floppy size, cause that actually affects the date estimates.
Oh, and I meant to add that I couldn't possibly count how many different Goldstar monitors I had over the years, probably including at least one of these tiny screens. And 10'll get you 20 that the monitor in the pic is amber, and not green, cause us cool dudes ONLY had amber, lol
you may be right but it doesnt change the fact that the image is still from around the time frame guessed at. so in all actuality if its from the same time frame, what you are saying doesnt actually matter.
@@thelasthallow Whether it matter to the search is irrelevant. It just demonstrates that a couple of main points of the video were wrong or inaccurate. Something I've figured out is that the printer shown in the image is a Panasonic KX-P1124 or KX-P1123 printer, which places the date of the image to probably after 1991 or 1992. Also the cup is most likely a Whirley Industries mug from the late 70s or early 80s. Maybe it hasn't solved the mystery, but I don't think it hurts to get more accurate information.
I can never unsee the cable from the wall looking like a cartoony little smoke trail from the cigarette
I see somebody else has already pointed out the Panasonic KX-P1180 printer from 1990. The only reason why I got rid of mine was because I could no longer get ribbon cartridges for it. But the printer worked great.
Then there was Eve Anderson. I remember finding her website back in the day. I think she was using web space provided by her university back then. But I remembered her fascination with Pi... and Sexy Suzy, and wondered why it took so long for you to mention those. BTW... I downloaded Sexy Suzy and it became the first music I downloaded off the internet. MP2 back then... I converted it to MP3 so it could play on my MP3 player.
Thanks for bringing back memories.
My theory is that he is the person who notoriously put the Max Headroom video onto WGN during the sports report in 1987.
Also he's DB Cooper.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 Sure. Might as well be.
The boxes of disks are 5.25 floppy disks. Look at how tall the boxes are. The IBM XT is 5.5 inches high and the XT definitely used 5.25 disk drives.
Seeing things like this makes me feel like I'm missing something, Born in 2005 I never experienced these things the wild age of the internet.
You did.
Kinda same here. Born in '04 but still glat that i have experienced the 2009-14 golden era of youtube.
I want one thing for Millenials & Zoomers to understand... we early internet users wanted 1 thing... PRIVACY, to be anonymous, & use AVATARS to hide behind while we shared UNCENSORED information!! All of this has been taken from us & now people are walking around IRL as those avatars. I dated a 23 y/o (I'm 44) & she wondered why my snapchat avatar had green hair. She literally YELLED at me because it "didn't look like me" & "it's supposed to." No... that's not why we invented all of this. You're running around IRL with green hair. The pretend world is the online world you live out fantasies there so you don't have to be wild IRL. You're doing it backwards. IDK how we got here but the censorship is gone, Alexa spies on you, all the TOS have signed away your rights.
Please... the internet is already destroyed. Fight for it back. There is still time in your lifetime before it's too late.
He’s probably a regular person and doesn’t want to be associated with the meme I feel
is funny how 2005 is now "early internet" honestly barely nothing has change since those internet (meme) days, is just more massive
Indeed, even youtube started in 2005.
I have seen this since the early 2000s, 2002, or 2003 even. It's been around a long long time.
I'm a huge computer nerd, and that computer doesn't look like a genuine IBM XT. It looks like a clone case which were popular to use with XT and AT motherboards. That monitor also isn't a genuine IBM but a clone. With no logos on either of them, im pretty much sure it's just a generic clone. With the amount of clones from small companies which were trying to get in on the home computer craze of the 80s and 90s, it's pretty much impossible to figure out what computer it exactly is. Just my 2 cents, nice video either way
The picture can't be older than 1982 then because that is when the first clones arrived on the market.
I went to high school with a lot of computer nerds (SF Bay Area,) back in the mid and early 80's.. Peter Thiel even went to my high school (San Mateo High). Back then we had computer clubs in high school.... usually had Apple II's and mostly the black "Bell and Howell" ones.. I also had a BBS (pre-internet model connection) that I rand from my house.. we had a guy in our nerd group by the name of Bill Rockafellar (RIP Dozer)... he looked exactly like this guy... not likely him as Bill didn't smoke.. That computer on his desk in the pic is an IBM PC/XT, circa 1981-83.. I doubt it's taken in the late 80's, more likely mid 80's... The printer also looks like an Epson dot matrix, maybe RX-80... I Had a PC/XT with a 10MB HD and a. Hayes 1200 (external) model, BTW, I was born in 1969
ewww, Peter Thiel. Hope you never had to meet him.
It's from 90s, not 80s, because this printer (Panasonic KX-P1191) was released in 1989, and I doubt that it's brand new.
Wait, why are we so certain that Wyndspirit guy in the beginning was lying? He even said it was probably taken in 88 or 89 which line up perfectly.
Being on the internet since 2006 I was able to access this early internet and this video filled me with comfy, warm nostalgia. Thank you
I love how the video went on a gigantic tangent yet still managed to hold my attention anyways
That was the hope lol.
I could make some kind of point on the fickleness of the internet or at least hold the attention of someone
That wall background is pure "What you think the 80's décor was like. What it was actually like."
Reads the nerd disclaimer in the voice of a jock from that era.
> Dude goes on journey to find nerd
>Dude falls in love with Caltech nerd instead
I think a lot of effort is made to make this video a half an hour of length.
yeah too much filler such as showing source for image copies that weren't even the oldest he found and quite obviously not any real source of the photo...
the original image is from a computer magazine in the early 90s
Was it from an ad or a reader? Any idea what the magazine name was?
I haven't even finished this video yet but one thing I learned is that most of those pre/early internet 'shoops' were just scans of old magazines or high quality, wholesale prints released online at some point. Basically professional ad services made most of them or professional photo shoot creators.
Good call, it could totally be from a magazine. Maybe some kind of "meet the team" section of a computer magazine?
when i first used the internet i just assumed most pictures were from magazines .because what else could be the origin.
@@belstar1128 When I first used the internet (1995) there were scanners around, so you could easily scan any photo ant put it on the internet. This particular photo is also from 90s.
No, it doesn't look like a professional photo from a mag. It's a usual amateur photo from those days, made with an ordinary poin-and-shoot camera.
I could swear I read an article written by the man in the photo sometime in the last decade on one of the tech blogs like gizmodo or such.
I’ve never seen a lost video that hooked me more then this. Can’t wait till the update video😊
I just hope he is ok, wherever he may be these days.
This picture is sticked to the door of my open space office … I work in IT …
I'm absolutely sure that I first came across the basement nerd photo in 1995/96. Had my own copy, but lost a huge quantity of material when my two new Seagate Barracuda external drives corrupted. Enjoyable episode.
tldr: he doesn't hunt successfully.
He is the Gentoo guy
Pat, this guy always reminded me of a fellow student in Montreal at Cégep du Vieux Montréal
This is a college (CEGEP) in Quebec province in Canada.
He was a friend of mine in 1991/92 He was a real nerd, no friends but me and my girlfriend. His name is Benoit if I remember correctly.
He was in computer programming first semester. I’m 58 so this is a long time ago. If I remember other things I’ll let you know.
Reminds me of a search I went on for a few pieces of music from my childhood. Some songs from the rare Laserdisc release of the anime: Tenchi Muyo. I eventually after about 5 years of searching, realized I had them all along, from a copy of the show on VHS my dad was given from a friend in college. I already had most of the soundtrack, but now I have the songs I was missing.
Even though you had not succeeded in uncovering the mystery, I would still like to thank you for a trip to the early days of the Internet. First time I got online was around 2007. Still early enough to remember the IRCs, lolcats, advice animals, shoop da whoop etc, but not nearly that early to see those endearing and quirky personal webpages. So, warm thanks for taking me down the memory lane. It really were simpler times.
You may want to contact Dan Bornstein the creator of Wall-o-Shame, who has been around on the Internet since its inception. I'm confident he might be able to shine some light on this "nerd" photo.
When I used to work with Mark he told me he was surprised nobody tracked him down after seeing an old photo of him went viral. I havent talked to him in a while
You know this guy in the photo?
I've never seen that picture before 5 minutes ago when I saw this vid in my recommended list. From the thumbnail, I actually thought this was going to tell us more about the "I don't care that you broke your elbow" kid who lives rent-free in my head.
Conclusion: nothing. Well fucking done.
nothing? I guess you skipped to the end.
Just an FYI, the printer in the photo is a Panasonic KX-P1180 which released in 1990.
I was really annoyed that he didn't immediately analyze the contents of the photo. Pretty poor
@@WormAteWords Yup, getting the floppy disk size wrong when its obvious they are not 3.5` from the box size alone is a huge red flag pointing to poor research. The xt had 5.25` drives as standard and the smaller ones were not used on such machines. Im guessing the picture was from the early 90s when dot matrix printers were everywhere and a relatively old pc like the one in the picture would be reasonably cheap to buy on the used market for hobbyist use.
I don't appreciate the lengthy tangent about some woman's old website followed by ending the video in failure
nah, it was pretty cool.
i just jumped to near the end and reached same conclusion
Agreed - I just found this guy's channel but that was slimy. Not watching another one.
Same!
That's just like, your opinion, man
this was a great video! kinda missed your channel for a while, commenting to help bring that algorithm magic in
Thankfully the little break is over now, I'll have more stuff coming down the pipe line. I missed seeing everyone reactions to the content :)
@@patratrick keep up the great work man!
Hey PatRatrick!
I've been wondering about when you were going to show up!
Paying fealty to our lord Jimi Hendrix brought me over the edge 🤣
Been wondering when the next vid was gonna be, this did not disappoint! I love niche internet history, and have wondered about this image myself. I also wonder what the origin of that one clown sitting at computer is lol
I feel like the clown has to be like a coworker on Halloween or something, uh oh. Here I go doing niche investigations again.
I just googled
Computer basement nerd
And the first image result is from KnowYourMeme.
If you click that image, the first related image is a newer picture of the same man.
It's from a site called memedroid, from 2018, and the image is labeled "I found him"
I think the rumors of a picture of the same guy from a different angle are just instances of the same photo horizontally flipped and/or cropped. But the composite image including a picture of the same man older appears to possibly be legitimate.
I'm pretty sure I found the original imgur page that would have been used in the reddit post 11 years ago.
The entire time I was searching for the second image for some reason it now just randomly pops up.
Edit: although tbh I'm not 100% convinced it's the same person. I have my doubts, but I do think this is the post being referred to on reddit
That's Jeremey from the Quartering.
a short trip to golden days of internet.
thank you
thanks for NOt sharing eve´s old page link tho :(, I wanted to play her song but Im too dumb to find it, I tried with your steps but failed miserably, now the jocks gonna bully me again
Heh