I'm pretty sure that this will have been done in the many years of newsgroups, IRC, SomethingAwful, 4chan, HN, reddit and random tripod/angelfire/geocities site

I'm pretty sure that this will have been done in the many years of newsgroups, IRC, SomethingAwful, 4chan, HN, reddit and random tripod/angelfire/geocities sites. This guy was the first one to be mainstream. It's like the MP3 player: Jobs had the audacity to say that Apple basically invented the MP3 player because their MP3 player was the best, not because it was the first. Same story with the iPhone. It wasn't the first touchscreen cellular phone, but it was the best. When a product is the best in class, it gets noticed. This was surely the lesson Jobs learned from Microsoft's success: don't worry about being the first, just worry about being the best or, at least, the loudest. And in this digital age, that's actually fine. If we valued people only because they had ideas first, nothing would actually be done about it and inventions would not be successful because half of the inventors would keep their creations tailored to their preferences rather than extending a generalised product that caters to everybody.