Lolcat

British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s.

[11] The News Journal states that "some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or 'Caturdays'."

Ikenburg adds that the images have been "slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?

"[13][14] Lev Grossman of Time wrote that the oldest known example "probably dates to 2006",[15] but later corrected himself in a blog post[16] where he recanted his statement based on the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of "Caturday" and many of the images now known by a few as "lolcats" in early 2005.

"[28] Many lolcat images capture cats performing characteristically human actions or appearing to use modern technology, such as computers.

[citation needed] There are several well-known Lolcat images and single-word captions that have spawned many variations and imitations, including "Ceiling Cat" (see below).

Others include Fail (a cat with a slice of processed cheese on its face)[29] and "I Can Has Cheezburger" (a portrait of a blue British Shorthair).

[34] Variations on the lolcat concept include captioning photos of other animals in a similar style (e.g. loldogs for dogs, etc.).

The syntax of lolcat captions was used as the basis for LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language with interpreters and compilers available in .NET Framework, Perl, etc.