Infinite Monkey Theorem in Popular Culture - Software and Internet Culture

Software and Internet Culture

• 1979 - Apple Computer released Bruce Tognazzini's "The Infinite No. Of Monkeys", a humorous demonstration of Apple BASIC, on their DOS 3.2 disk for the Apple II computer.
• 1995 - "The famous Brett Watson" published his Internet paper, "The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare" which was, in 2000, to be included as a reference in RFC 2795 (see below)
• 1996 — Robert Wilensky once jocularly remarked, "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." This version of the internet analogy "began appearing as a very frequent email and web-page epigraph starting in 1997".
  • A variant appeared in USENET at about the same time: "The Experiment has begun! A million monkeys and a million keyboards. We call it USENET."
• 2000 — The IETF Internet standards committee's April Fools' Day RFC proposed an "Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)", a method of directing a farm of infinitely many monkeys over the Internet.
• 2005 — Goats, a webcomic illustrated by Jonathan Rosenberg, started in August 2005 an ongoing story line named infinite typewriters where several characters accidentally teleport to an alternate dimension. There they find that this dimension is populated by monkeys with typewriters, presumably typing the scripts of many other dimensions.
• 2006 — The Infinite Monkey Project was launched by predictive text company T9. The Europe-wide project sees users, unknown to each other, text a word of their choosing to the Website. The text message is free and as it continues the words are combined to form lyrics. The lyrics are then made into a song by the Hip Hop artist Sparo which will be released as an album. If any of the tracks becomes a hit the people who texted in the words for the lyrics will receive royalties from the project.
• 2007 — A website named One Million Monkeys Typing was introduced, a collaborative writing site where anyone can sign up and add writing "snippets" that others can add on to, eventually creating stories with many outcomes.
• 2008 — An issue of MAD shows a depiction of the Infinite Monkey Theorem which states that when good monkeys go bad, one of the infinite monkeys would surely plagiarize A Tale of Two Cities.
• 2008 - Monkeys are depicted typing random bits of text in Google's online comic book advertising their Google Chrome Web Browser.
• 2009 - Infinite Monkey Comics was launched, which features a random comic generator that creates three-panel comics by placing a random tweet from Twitter over a random image from Flickr based on keywords of the user's choosing. The result is a nearly inexhaustible collection of potential comics generated by the random musings and typing of internet users.
• 2009 - Monkeys With Typewriters draws its namesake from the theorem.
• 2010 - Lyrois Beating a Million Monkeys a somewhat sarcastic look at contemporary art uses the monkeys as a metaphor.
• 2011 - www.shakespearean-monkeys.com a social literature website, where the users are the monkeys.