The internet was only in a fledgling phase when the first sort of viral event happened. Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet that flew very close to Jupiter and whose fragments were shredded by Jupiter's gravity.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 lit up the tiny online community. Degroot found that nearly as many people as were hooked up to the internet at the time accessed NASA's resources about impact week.
"This was really the first sort of viral event," Degroot said, and the internet fervor was covered by print media as well. "That really raised the profile of the internet, and not just for the online minority but also for the offline majority … it was pretty much everywhere."
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
