Twenty years ago, throughout 1996 and beyond, the "Meow Wars" waged on Usenet. Popular at universities, the non-centralised computer network consisted of news groups for specific topics and file sharing. "Meowers," as the early trolls were known, flooded these boards and derailed them with blocks of text, posting quotes from Monty Python or Beavis and Butthead, personal insults, and nonsense exchanges about a cat named Fluffy. The resulting conflict was a landmark in internet history, and possibly the birth of trolling as we know it.

In a YouTube clip from an episode of American kids' show Mr Rogers' Neighbourhood, dating from 1971, a puppet named Henrietta Pussycat has flown into a rage. "Meow meow meow meow meow…" Everything Henrietta says is punctuated with meows.

I spoke to Bruce, having tracked him down through social media. He seemed to be still irritated and baffled in equal part by the memory of the meowers. "Sometimes people I've known for decades will make a 'meow' joke and I'm not sure how best to tell them how strongly I prefer they not do that," he told me.

It had been meant as a joke, albeit an arrogant one, but the Beavis and Butthead fans struck back . They drove the students from their online home, claiming alt.fan.karl-malden.nose for themselves as a base from which to invade further boards. One of the original alt.fan.karl-malden.nose members had the initials C.A.T., which inspired the invaders to adopt "meow" as their mantra. Thus commenced the Meow Wars.

"Sometimes people I've known for decades will make a 'meow' joke and I'm not sure how best to tell them how strongly I prefer they not do that"

"I suggest that we start either posting or crossposting to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. I also suggest that we use big words and perfect grammar, and refuse to write as the young ruffians in question speak… This could lead to some interesting 'dialogue.' "

Then a Harvard student and Nose regular named Matt Bruce posted to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead (the "alt.*" prefix indicated a hierarchy of left-field groups offered without centralised control in addition to the main boards) and joked that the Harvard students would invade them. He is quoted on an archived site as follows:

The origins of this flame war are difficult to untangle. In January 1996, an abandoned board named in preposterous homage to the actor Karl Malden 's nose had been colonised by a group of Harvard students. "Alt.fan.karl-malden.nose," known colloquially as "the Nose," was used as a message board for arranging lunch meetings and posting campus events.

Bruce clarified that most of the stories he's read about his own involvement in the wars are wrong. "I did not post the deluge of 'meow' posts attributed to me," he said. "Some people—to this day I do not know who—took offence at something I did post, and decided to get revenge by using my name when they spammed other Usenet groups." Fake Matt Bruces proliferated throughout 1996, apparently triggered by that single empty threat.

Among the Meowers was Jeff Boyd, aka "The 2-Belo," whose account of the Meow Wars, now hosted on another site, is one of the few online records left behind. Having contacted him through his blog, I spoke to Boyd over email and he shared his recollections. "Compared to the well-regulated hierarchies like rec.*, talk.* and so on, alt.* was completely wide open and without any official supervision," he said. "Users could create new newsgroups at will. So you'd end up with silly groups with names like alt.butt.harp and alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, empty joke groups that had no users but were present on a million servers worldwide."

Boyd told me he only joined the war effort after the initial meower raid on alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. Before that, he'd been part of the alt.flame group, "a kind of text-based Fight Club." Turned loose on a lawless early internet, "kind of like a ghost town in the Old West," Boyd remembers that, "There were now roving bands of outlaws—trolls—randomly cycling through newsgroups looking for poop to disturb."

"At the height of the trolling, my email address at Boston University became unusable, and the admins dropped all messages addressed to my account"

Usenet allowed for cross-posting to multiple boards. Boyd explained, "Trolls latched onto this and took it to the next level, posting junk and provocative articles to hundreds of groups at once, and scrambling discourse like a crazed chimpanzee at a telephone switchboard." One of these trolls found a random post Bruce had made referencing the Mr Rogers character Henrietta Pussycat, she of the "meow meow meow" speech, and circulated it. Boyd likens what happened next to "a phenomenon later known as 'going viral.'"