This little video is a true blast from the past — a clip from a game show called “To Tell the Truth.” The goal of the game is for the four-person “celebrity” panel to properly identify a contestant out of a group of three people. (The word celebrity is in quotes due to the fact that we only recognize one such “celebrity” on the panel in the clip, and only know him as Uncle Joey from Full House.) The contestant is someone who has done something out of the ordinary, or something that might be considered newsworthy.
The contestant in this clip is none other than Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The show was originally aired in the year 2000, which is long time before Google was really a household name. We have purposely omitted a picture of Brin in this post so as not to spoil the video, in case you you want to play along.
The best part about this video is that there is a very good chance that even those who follow tech news will not be able to pick out Brin from the line-up. Just like on the show, Brin does a great job of not attracting much attention, and you don’t hear too much about him on a regular basis. Brin’s company makes enough news on its own, and he does a great a job of not stealing the spotlight. He is so behind the scenes that another company’s CEO is the most popular person on the social network he helped build.
Watching the video it is pretty amazing to see how little was known about Google and the Internet in general in the year 2000. Uncle Joey amazed the other panelists by asking questions like “What does HTML stand for?”, and one panelist thought you had to physically plug a search engine into a computer.
All four panelists guessed wrong as well as the audience when they were polled. That means that Brin and the two imposters, an attorney and professional bowler, got to split the $5,000 prize. Hopefully Brin invested that money wisely, who knows if he will need it at some point.
