Genesis 1:3: At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
Yeah, you’ve heard of cheezburger, and you has had it. But I Can Haz Cheezburger is not when cats evolved into ruling mankind — the history of the Internet and cats, as of 2010, is ten years old. It all began way back in the late 1990s, but nobody knows for sure exactly when. We don’t know when the first Internet Cat was made, but we know the first one known by man:
Example flyer posted in cat ghettos.
At some point in the 1990s, Bay Fly Magazine from Portland, Oregon printed that, spreading religious intolerance of cats like a demented anti-kitten Chick Tract. Someone scanned the flyer, and began sending it around in e-mail when the World Wide Web was still just a deformed fugly beast populated by Blink Tags that dwelled in the hearts of the Mosaic Web Browser. It wouldn’t be the last time people would call for the mass execution of kittens at human hands. It wasn’t long before we began to enslave and grow Bonsai Kittens in the year 2000.
Grown at MIT, man's first attempt to understand cats.
Next came the Punk Kittens on Rathergood, who began to preach their new religion free of man’s bottling influence:
Preaching through music.
But we weren’t done with the kittens yet, and that old hate from the 1990s was coming back in full force. Later in 2002, the people at Fark.com stopped their persecution and intolerance toward North Carolina’s higher education system (Duke sucks) long enough to turn their bigotry on kittens and human sexual expression, when this old hateful language resurfaced, combined with Japanese religious iconography.
The dark days of Japan's Kitten Purge, before the coming of Maru.
At some time in 2005, 4chan began the high holy day of Caturday, which then then got spread onto Livejournal, and finally had it’s own Caturday Livejournal group in 2006.
Caturday, before open religious expression was possible.
At this point, Caturday was still underground. You had to know a cat, be on 4chan, or know someone who knew someone. That all changed for the world on the day that Happycat was discovered, sometime around 2004. While Caturday was an underground religion, the world was about to get the Good Word, because the kitty messiah had been busy out wandering the desert that is Something Awful from 2003 onwards, unknown by the wider world. Behold, Happy Cat.
He was happy.
Then this happened, and Happycat came down from the mountain bearing the words of Ceiling Cat…
At last, thanks to his message, humans paid attention to the Internets.
Icanhascheezburger.com has registered in January, 2007, and the rest was history. But lest anyone ever forget, Icanhascheezburger.com is just a site. The Happycat was the Moses of the Internet Cat. Icanhascheezburger.com and their empire of related web sites, while nice, are like the Mormons of the Cat World: later generations that just keep coming.
Happycat–his name was Frank, before he took on the role of a prophet–passed away in 2007 and returned to Ceiling Cat, but his teachings remain, and if you look here you can see that the disciples of Happycat are legion, and humans are learning their secret gnostic tongue.
The word of Ceiling Cat has even spread to the East, under the Church of Maru in Asia.
Here’s a documentary filmed in 2010 on the history of the Internet, sung as a kitty devotional by Joel at Rathergood, who created the Punk Kittens:
And there, we see, is ten years of the scientific and religious evolution of cats online.
