Inkling: The World’s Very First Internet Bot

It seems like for the past ten years or so, hardly a day, or even an hour, passes by without the world reading or hearing about Internet Bots, whether they be good, bad or malicious. For those of us who are very busy and always on the go, here is a quick and simple explanation of what an Internet Bot is.

The oldest Internet bots in the world can be traced as far back as 1988, when on August 8, 1988, great inventor Andre Gray uploaded the very first complete song on the Internet titled “Internet killed The Video star”, a song he composed in the MIDI format on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. He also invented the world’s very first Internet bot he named “inkling” —a crawler bot with artificial intelligence.

An Internet bot is a software application that performs automated tasks by running scripts over the Internet. Bots perform simple, structurally repetitive tasks much more quickly, efficiently, and accurately than is humanly possible. The oldest Internet bots in the world can be traced as far back as 1988, when on August 8, 1988, great inventor Andre Gray uploaded the very first complete song on the Internet titled “Internet killed The Video star”, a song he composed in the MIDI format on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. He also invented the world’s very first Internet bot he named “inkling” —a crawler bot with artificial intelligence . Gray used a free software called FIDONET to disseminate the song’s MIDI file coupled with inkling across disparate BBS: Bulleting Board Systems, Usenet groups and Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short—signaling the official birth of the online digital music ( and digital media) revolution. Seeing and experiencing the success of inkling, software developers began to create and releasing their own Internet bots within weeks of inkling’s debut. Bill Wisner released Bartender; Greg Lindhal released a game manager bot for the game ‘Hunt The Wumpus’, and Jurki Alakuijala’s Puppe. Today, Internet bots are extremely crucial to the creation and functionality of the web and search engines. The internet without any bot activity is like an ocean without water or a hamburger without meat. In fact, published scientific papers and studies have shown that bots make up an amazing 75% of all Internet activity.