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Chuck Norris can divide by zero. The absurdist one-liner engine of 2005 colonized forum signatures, email chains, and lunchrooms — hyperbolic "facts" about one man's toughness that became a shared vocabulary for the whole internet.
The online service before AOL was AOL. CompuServe numbered its users with octal digits, ran tight moderated forums instead of chaotic chat rooms, and invented the GIF. By 1995 it claimed 3 million subscribers — then AOL's cheap flat-rate marketing machine ran it over.
An anime-styled forum where your dressed-up chibi avatar appeared next to every post, and where browsing, posting and playing games earned the gold to dress it. In 2007 its members were making more than a million posts a day.