On April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was distributed on the spankin’-new ARPANET by Steve Crocker of UCLA. Today, the RFC is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the global community of computer network researchers. ARPANET would later be incorporated with other networks to giveth life to our modern Internet.

Though most people don’t know how it works (“it’s a series of tubes“), the Internet has provided us with information and entertainment beyond the imagination of ARPANET’s creators. Without it, we’d have no Wikipedia to deliberately falsify, no YouTube stars like Double-Rainbow Guy, and (worst of all, of course) no Geeks Are Sexy–or sexy geeks, probably, since so many areas of geek culture are firmly grounded in teh interwebz.

In celebration of the Internet’s symbolic birthday, why don’t we do something fun? What’s the best thing about the Internet, Geeks? Why do you love it? Choose something you think is a shining achievement / a horrible omen / mind-bendingly memetic / straight-up web geekery and drop a link in the comments.