Ep 3 — “The Least Secret Secret”
The Honest Corner:
Onion routing was developed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s; the Tor software was publicly released in 2002, and The Tor Project formed in 2006.
Every Short, in the family record
Newest first. Each entry lists the day the Short came out, the moment from internet history it tells, who is in it, and the Honest Corner footnote in full — the true story under the joke.
Ep 2 — “The Man Who Gave Away the World”
The Honest Corner:
On 30 April 1993 CERN released the World Wide Web technology into the public domain, royalty-free — widely credited as a decisive reason the web outgrew its paid rivals (e.g., Gopher's licensing turn).
Ep 1 — “The September That Never Ended”
The Honest Corner:
AOL began offering Usenet/internet access to its subscribers in September 1993; 'Eternal September' is the period name coined by the existing internet community.
Ep 0 (pilot) — “Who Is This Web Guy Anyways?”
The Honest Corner:
The first website (info.cern.ch) went live 6 Aug 1991. The internet itself dates to ARPANET (1969) and the TCP/IP standard (1983).
No episode matches that — yet. The family record grows by one Short a day.
Meet the family
Web (Dad)
The World Wide Web himself. Earnest, 1991 manners, still calls it “the information superhighway.”
Dark (the brother)
The Dark Web. Ominous reputation, wholesome record: grows onions, lends books, cares about privacy.
Grandpa Dial-Up
Takes three minutes to arrive in any room, screeching happily. Everything he knows is from 1997 — and he is not wrong as often as the kids expect.
She Web (the daughter)
The social web, and the kids' big sister. Every trend enters the house through her; holder of the family's professional eye-roll.
Mrs Fiber Optic (the Motherweb)
The grandmother, and Grandpa's wife. The backbone of the whole family: every message travels through her, at the speed of light.
Dot (Mom)
Dot Com. Ran a store in the boom, kept the receipts from the bust, unshakeable. The family's adult. (Portrait coming with her introduction episode.)
Virt (the cousin)
Virtual Web. Arrives wearing a headset, walks into real furniture, insists the lamp was a rendering error. (Portrait coming with his introduction episode.)
The kids — Web 3, Web 4, Web 5
Each generation louder and more certain than the last. Web 3 tokenizes the couch. Web 5, the baby, speaks fluent AI. (Portraits coming with their introduction episodes.)
The Voice (the Narrator)
Never seen, only heard. He narrates the family's life — the family can hear him, and argues back mid-sentence. He delivers the Honest Corner.
And the neighbours
Wi-Fi (invisible; blamed for everything) · Spam (the uncle nobody invited; he's in the kitchen) · Pop-Up (bursts out of closets mid-sentence) · Cookie (sweet, brings cookies, remembers everything about you — everything) · the Cloud (lives “somewhere else”; it's just someone else's house) · Router (blinks, says nothing, runs the whole home).
About the show
One Short a day. A hook, one real dated moment from internet history, one family scene — and the Honest Corner, where the joke steps aside and the true footnote gets told straight. The comedy is invented; the history is not. Classic moments are re-enacted by the family in the show's own art and voices, never lifted — and anything used as-is is verifiably public domain, checked per item.
Longer episodes will arrive later, assembled as compilations of these Shorts. This page is the family's permanent record: every Short, its date, its story, and its footnote.