#rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.

Which you knew already – MSNBC, after all – but CrunchGear confirms it with this report that NBC has canned the person who uploaded the Couric/Gumbel video from 1994 where they were asking what this ‘Internet’ thing was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI&feature=player_embedded

CrunchGear went on to note that people weren’t laughing at Couric & Gumbel, just with them.  Well… possibly there was a little bit of laughing at them, but nothing malicious, I swear.  In 1994 I was just starting to use Mosaic (remember that?) to look up things at school while relying on AOL* for most of my online needs.  No Google.  Hell, no Yahoo.com until later.  I don’t want to go all stone knives and bear skins here, but this was back in the day, computationally speaking.  Just because those questions sound stupid now didn’t mean that they sounded stupid back then.

But you know what is stupid?  Making this thing more of a story than it needed to be.  Firing somebody for uploading 89 seconds of slightly embarrassing video could end up being a bit more of a hit to NBC’s reputation than the video itself…

Moe Lane

PS: We will now pause while somebody pounds the table and shouts that NBC has the right to fire one of their employees for publicly uploading NBC’s video footage without permission.  So stipulated… and, again: humorless toads.

*Dial-up.  Only a fixed number of hours per month free.  Big fanfare when they added a web browser.

6 thoughts on “#rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.”

  1. AOL? I first logged onto CompuServe in 1994. I think my computer had a 512M hard drive and 1M RAM. Those were the days.

  2. And when AOL opened up the internet to it’s members, the existing folks were *not* amused. I remember all the bitching and whining (while I was on CompuServe) back then.

    Of course, that was PRECISELY the moment the internet took off in the minds of people. And now here we are.

  4. Back then I had a dial-up SLIP/shell account on a unix box (paid about $25 a month for it), and I remember well the day usenet died a lingering horrible death, as of the AOL invasion. Sure, the internet itself took off, but usenet’s S/N ratio quickly approached zero.

  5. I had to laugh at this comment:

    Sarah Palin should play this, anytime someone refers to the famous Katie Couric interview.

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