To mark the 20th anniversary of the IT industry’s Y2K excitement and the subsequent Dot-com bubble pop sequel, the time feels right to publish an article I wrote in February 2000 for which I never found a channel to publish. It’s remained hitherto unseen by anyone. But before I take you back 20 years in my own words, here’s a table that will provide you some references points to anchor your mind in the direction I’ll be taking you:

* This was the best I could do – please feel free to correct me if this is wrong.

** Benji Madden & Joel Madden are members of the rock band Good Charlotte, and were born on the very day of the Dot-com Bubble Burst.

OK, so with those references points, here it is, my original unpublished February 2000 story in its full, unedited, sardonic originality:

From the industry that brought you such memorable Three and Four Letter Acronyms as Y2K, CBT, IBM and RTFM comes a new epoch of nomenclature that will save litres of laser printer ink and oodles of OOS cases. Gone are the days of TLAs and FLAs. The computer industry has moved on to e-LAs. That’s Electronic Letter Acronyms.

In the early days of personal computing – the 70s and 80s – people began using computer-based communication facilities to send each other messages. To distinguish this new form of message communication from the traditional hand-delivered postal mail method, the process was called “electronic mail”. People soon became tired of this long and unwieldy phrase and so it was sensibly shortened to “e-mail”.

Within a decade, this term has become a household buzz-phrase. Soon after, the abbreviating of the word electronic to a simple e- crept into more than just mail. Now the industry is spiraling out of control with new e-LAs crawling out of the ether daily. There are e-go maniacs clambering over each other to create the next e-LA. We’ve got e-commerce, e-government and e-business, egad.

There are “experts” on national television claiming that the new millennium is “the millennium of e-commerce”. If we’re still talking e-bollocks in the year 2500 let alone 2990 then I’ll eat my e-hat, wires and all. This statement is as ludicrous as claiming in the year 1000 that the new millennium would be the millennium of the feather pen.

The real reason for this flurry of e-LAs is that the computer industry has a surplus of consultants post-Y2K and the IT Marketing and Sales teams are looking for ways to get them employed and generate a post-Y2K buck.

It’s only a matter of time before some TLA-loving e-gghead puts binary-one and binary-one together and comes up with the first e-TLA hybrid like RTFe-M.

One new e-nnoying trend that is emerging in this new naming spree should be shunned by all e-phobes and purists alike. This trend involves the creation of an e-LA from a non-word, and example being “e-conomy”. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this referring to the “electronic conomy”? What on earth is a conomy? A gathering of short criminals? Two other equally offensive terms are e-tailer (electronic tailers for sheep?) and e-vent (electronic vents?).

What will this e-revolution mean to the topology of the English dictionary? No longer will there be a fair and reasonable balance between A and Z. We’ll all be using three volumes: A to D, e-, and E to Z.

Where will this e-LA wave end? How many e-diots will be left washed up on the beach of e-Hype? This e-xasperating e-vil must be stopped. We must be e-mancipated from the tide that has reached e-mergency levels. Let’s end this e-poch e-mmediately.

2020 Postnote: It’s pleasing to say that the e- prefix lost as much popularity as the Dot-com investors lost money. This story was borne out of frustration with the level of IT hype that had built around the millennium, and my tolerance burst in February 2000. The Dot-com bubble burst on 11 March 2000 was, in my view, a necessary hype correction in a maturing IT industry.