The Old Man of the Internet Humor
October 11th, 2007 -- by Augie De Blieck Jr.
You kids today.
You think the internet has always just been there.
You think IM on a phone is a standard option.
You think video has always been a download away.
And you haven’t a clue what ^H^H^H^H^H^H means, anyway.
I pity you.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Heh. I still use ^H^H^H^H^H^H on occasion… and every time I do, I have to wonder if the person/people reading it will understand.
Thanks, Augie, for making me feel old.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
…. nope, no idea on that last one. *Short pause whilst googling…. ” “Another short pause after giving up on google and trying yahoo.* *yet another short pause in order to regain consciousness after yahoo found it on the first try*
Hehehehe. That’s great. I may have to use that now.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Dude.
You know I’ve been on the internet, the World Wide Web, since 1996.
What the heck does ^H^H^H^HHH^H^^H mean?
CJA
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Back in the old days (when all we had was Telnet, FTP and Gopher and we LIKED it — we also walked to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways), many terminals used the keystroke CTRL-H to backspace. However, if CTRL-H wasn’t mapped to the backspace, ^H would be displayed.
This led to humor where a “mistake” was made intentionally, such as
“Man, I hope my ex-wife chokes on^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Henjoys my alimony payment.”
For every character that was supposed to be “deleted”, ^H was printed instead. Much like using the del or strike tag in HTML pages, the “unintended” word is still displayed alongside the “correct” replacement word.