I found this article downright fascinating:
Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History. You Internet old timers probably know all about the backstory -- Hell, pea was probably involved -- but the first time I saw our stretched out friend was at IIDB ca. 2000.
The article does not embed the picture, btw, although it does link to it.
Quote:
The first step came when the famous image from the file was plucked off of Usenet by a group of online friends called the Hick crew. By all accounts, Hick members were that special geek brand of technically brilliant poop joke-tellers. They were teenage hackers, programmers, pranksters, and internet fanatics, mostly men, who made their home base on the website Hick.org ("The Hick.org farm") and shot the shit in chat rooms.
The Hick.org website was managed by Matthew Miller, a notorious computer programmer known online as "Skape." Miller would eventually make his name developing Metasploit, a powerful tool for finding vulnerabilities in software, and he now works for Microsoft's security team in Seattle. A giant cow's face with a human mouth greeted visitors to Hick.org, which also hosted the official site of the "Firm Penis Corp."
By 1998, the Goatse image had become a running joke in the Hick crew, used to screw with one another and their enemies. One of their favorite pranks, according to former Hick associate Orin Heidlberg, was to invade Christian chat rooms and scroll endless links to the image until the room emptied and they could use it for themselves.
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