Instead the story is that the source engine was located in the "Src" directory in their Visual Source Safe. And the Half Life 1 engine was in a separate branch named GoldSrc because it was about to ship real soon, and they needed to keep changes to a minimum.
That's not why it's called that. The real reason is that they didn't bother ever giving it a name. When they needed a stable fork so they could further develop the engine without interfering with the development of Half-Life, they referred to the two source codes "GoldSrc" and "Src" and the name stuck.
I'm in my mid 40s and when I was that age let's say in the mid 90s there were hardly any digital cameras and the image doesn't look like a scan... So it's day here is in his mid thirties. Know your memes says the picture is from 2009, so that roughly matches.
I started my Steam account in 2004(?) because it was required to do so even though I bought the DVD-ROM version of HL2. Imagine my rage when it also forced me to update -- I was on dial-up at the time.
Ohh man, i am right there with you. It was the same for me with CS however I already had it installed. I wanted to update to 1.6 but I had steam installed and it forced me to update steam before I could update CS. I know they had a lot of growing pains but they eventually did it right due to our struggle.
I'm shocked people didn't realize this. Maybe it was obvious to me because I was playing valve games before steam came out? I think the game Blood 2 even made a joke about it on a sign on the museum level.