Global Alert For All: Jesus Is Coming Soon
On January 18, 1994 someone posting as “Clarence Thomas IV” posted a message titled “Global Alert for All: Jesus Is Coming Soon” to basically every Usenet newsgroup 1text-based discussion forums, kind of like chat rooms but dating well back before the World Wide Web and dwindling in importance as the Web became the prevailing interface to the Internet on the planet, including many that didn’t actually exist and some that had only existed in alternate timelines.
His prediction of the imminent return to Earth of one Jesus H. Christ promptly got cancelbotted across the board, but not before dozens, possibly hundreds, of mocking and questioning responses were offered up by the stunned and perturbed denizens of Usenet.
As we soon learned, “Thomas”‘s post was not the harbinger of Jesus’s return, but rather, of the beginning of the end for Usenet as we understood it. Spam and heavy-handed responses to spam became the order of the day, and at some point Tim Pierce 2Tim is a great guy who at that time spent a shit-ton of time back in the day trying to keep Usenet from descending into absolute chaos. The off-handed reference to him here is just a poke in the side for old times’ sake ascended into the heavens where he remains to this day, a fierce and judgmental deity whose edicts are not to be ignored.
Seems like only yesterday… but as of January 2019, it’ll have been TWENTY-FIVE years. (Shouldn’t Jesus have gotten here by now?)
Footnotes [ + ]
1. ↑ text-based discussion forums, kind of like chat rooms but dating well back before the World Wide Web and dwindling in importance as the Web became the prevailing interface to the Internet 2. ↑ Tim is a great guy who at that time spent a shit-ton of time back in the day trying to keep Usenet from descending into absolute chaos. The off-handed reference to him here is just a poke in the side for old times’ sake