Today I heard the song “Twisting” by They Might Be Giants. It has the line:
“So turn off your smoke machine and Marshall Stack”
In 1994, for the first time in my life, I had access to the World Wide Web through my school computing class. I set out to figure out what the heck a “Marshall Stack” was. Of course, I know now that it is this:
Anyway, I could not find the information! It was several years until I learned this bit of trivia, seeing a stack at a concert somewhere. But at that point in 1994, NCSA Mosaic did not yet support text-input boxes so it was impossible to search for something! You had to go to Yahoo, and poke around in the directory until you found what you were looking for.
It’s easy to forget there was a time when every single bit of trivia was not at your fingertips.
