Usenet & Early Web

1990 — 1999. Memetics moves onto wires. Usenet newsgroups host the first repeated formats: ASCII art signatures, FAQ catchphrases, in-group acronyms that mean nothing outside the thread. Mike Godwin formalises the era's first observed law in August 1990: any sufficiently long online argument approaches probability one of a Hitler comparison. The text-only meme has rules now. Emoticons (Scott Fahlman, 1982) become the first visual primitive most users learn. The smiley creeps off Carnegie Mellon's BBoards and onto the open net. The early web layers GeoCities and Angelfire over the substrate: under-construction GIFs, blinking text, marquee tags, web-ring graphics. Mahir from Turkey welcomes you to his page in 1999 and becomes the first single individual to go globally viral through email forwarding. Hampster Dance teaches the world that a webpage can be a joke. All Your Base Are Belong to Us, a botched Zero Wing translation, becomes the bridge from text macro to image macro when Photoshoppers in early 2001 paste the phrase onto every landmark on Earth. The medium is still mostly text, but the format is already self-aware and proudly stupid.

Part of The Meme Oracle

24 moments in this segment.

  1. — Scott Fahlman Proposes :-). Date: 19 September 1982 · Place: Carnegie Mellon University CS bboard, Pittsburgh · Figures: Scott E. Fahlman, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon · Tags: Emoticon, Visual Primitive, BBoard 01. 11:44 AM On A Tuesday On 19 September 1982 at 11:44 AM, Scott Fahlman posts to the CMU computer science department bulletin board with a modest proposal. A thread about elevator physics has gone sideways because nobody can tell which messages are jokes. Fahlman suggests :-) as a joke marker and :-( for the opposite. The post is recovered in 2002 from a backup tape after twenty years of being thought lost. The original survives as a flat text file with the timestamp intact. "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." — Scott Fahlman, CMU CS bboard, 19 September 1982 02. The First Visual Primitive The smiley escapes Carnegie Mellon within weeks via ARPANET gateways, hits Usenet by 1983, and is universal by the time the web exists. It is the first widely-adopted visual element in text-only communication, a tiny ASCII glyph that does what a body would do if a body were present. Every emoji on every phone in 2026 descends from these three characters. Fahlman, asked about emoji decades later, said he prefers his original because it requires effort to decode and reward to recognize. Sources • Scott Fahlman, 'Smiley Lore :-)' (CMU faculty page) • Mike Jones, recovery of the original 1982 post (Microsoft Research, September 2002) • The New York Times, 'A Universal Symbol, in Need of Marketing' (29 September 2007)
  2. — You've Got Mail. Date: 1989 (recorded), 1993-2017 (in service) · Place: Quantum Computer Services, Vienna, Virginia (later AOL) · Figures: Elwood Edwards, voice actor · Tags: Audio Meme, AOL, Notification Sound 01. Elwood Edwards In A Living Room In 1989, Karen Edwards mentions to her husband Elwood, a voice actor, that her employer is looking for someone to record system prompts for their new online service. Elwood records four phrases on a tape recorder in their living room: Welcome, You've got mail, Files done, Goodbye. He is paid two hundred dollars. The phrases ship with Quantum Link, then with AOL when Quantum rebrands in 1991. 02. Three Syllables That Defined A Decade By 1996, You've got mail is so culturally bonded to AOL that Warner Bros. names a Nora Ephron film after it. Edwards never received royalties; AOL gave him a one-time bonus and the use of the line for life. He drove a cab in Cleveland for most of the 90s. The sound is retired when AOL Mail shuts down its desktop client in 2017. Elwood Edwards dies on 5 November 2024. The obituaries lead with the three syllables. "You've got mail." — Elwood Edwards, recorded on a home tape deck, 1989 Sources • The New York Times, 'Elwood Edwards, Voice of You've Got Mail, Dies at 74' (5 November 2024) • CNN, 'Meet the voice behind AOL's You've Got Mail' (15 August 2015) • Wikipedia, 'Elwood Edwards'
  3. — Godwin's Law. Date: August 1990 · Place: Usenet, primarily talk.* and soc.* newsgroups · Figures: Mike Godwin, attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation · Tags: Usenet, The First Internet Law 01. The Observation Mike Godwin, then 34 and working as an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posts an observation to Usenet in August 1990: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. He is describing a behavior he has watched repeat for years on the discussion networks of the pre-web internet. Godwin will later say in interviews that he posted it less as humor than as a meme deliberately, an attempt to put a name on the pattern that would slow the pattern down. He invented the term for what he was creating; he wanted users to think twice before reaching for the Hitler comparison. 02. The First Internet Law It works imperfectly. The reductio-ad-Hitlerum reflex outlives Usenet, outlives the discussion networks of every following decade. But Godwin's Law itself becomes the first widely-acknowledged internet folk-law, taught informally to new users for 35 years and counting. It is also the first internet meme in the Dawkins sense to be designed by its author to do a specific cultural job. Godwin's Law is, in its original 1990 sense, a memetic countermeasure to a worse meme. Mike Godwin is a memetic engineer. "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." — Mike Godwin, Usenet, August 1990 Sources • Mike Godwin, Wired (October 1994): 'Meme, Counter-meme' • Wikipedia, Godwin's law
  4. — Leetspeak Orthography. Date: BBS era through late 1990s · Place: Pirate BBS scenes, then alt.* hierarchies, then Counter-Strike chat · Figures: Pirate scene sysops · 2600 readership · Quake clan tag culture · Tags: Orthography, Subcultural Filter, 1337 01. Filter Evasion Becomes Identity Leetspeak, the substitution of digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters, starts as a pragmatic tool on pirate BBSes in the late 1980s. Operators name boards +H3 W4R3Z H0US3 to slip past automated keyword scanners run by lawful sysops. By the time the web exists, the cipher has detached from utility and become a marker of belonging. By the late 1990s Quake clan tags are written [D34TH], Counter-Strike trash talk is j00 g0t 0wn3d n00b, and the convention is fully self-aware. Magazines like 2600 use it editorially. 02. The First Internet Register Leetspeak is the first major orthographic register native to networked computing. SMS abbreviation, lolspeak, doge, zoomer caps, the present-day iykyk attention economy, all inherit from it the principle that how you spell it is identity work, not noise. It also previews the present-day tactic of using deliberate misspellings (unalive, seggs) to evade platform moderation. Same trick, thirty years apart. Sources • The Jargon File 4.4.7, entry 'B1FF' and 'leetspeak' • Mikhaila Friel, 'A Brief History of Leetspeak' (Atlas Obscura, 30 May 2018) • Wikipedia, 'Leet'
  5. — The Trojan Room Coffee Pot. Date: 1991-2001 · Place: Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge · Figures: Quentin Stafford-Fraser, researcher · Paul Jardetzky, researcher · Tags: First Webcam, Live Feed, Cambridge 01. A Camera Pointed At A Coffee Pot Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky install a camera in the Trojan Room of the Cambridge Computer Lab in 1991. It points at the shared coffee filter machine. A frame-grabber updates an image three times a minute so researchers on other floors can check whether the pot is full before walking down. It is a private internal utility for two years. Then in November 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson plug it into the early World Wide Web. 02. The First Webcam Becomes A Pilgrimage By 1995 the coffee pot is one of the most-visited URLs on Earth. Strangers from every continent load cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html to check the level of a coffee pot in a building they will never enter. Krups eventually replaces the pot with a sponsored model. The feed is unplugged at 09:54 GMT on 22 August 2001. The final pot sells at auction for $4,800. Every Twitch stream and Ring doorbell descends from it. Sources • Quentin Stafford-Fraser, 'The Trojan Room Coffee Pot' (May 1995, cl.cam.ac.uk) • BBC News, 'The Coffee Pot That Started It All' (22 August 2001) • Wikipedia, 'Trojan Room coffee pot'
  6. — All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Date: 1992 origin, 2000-2001 viral peak · Place: Sega Mega Drive port of Zero Wing, Japan · Tribal War forums, USA · Figures: Toaplan, original developer · Bad translator, unknown · Bad_CRC, Tribal War forum user · Tags: Mistranslation, Image Macro Wave, Flash 01. Someone Set Up Us The Bomb Toaplan ports the arcade shooter Zero Wing to the Sega Mega Drive in 1992. The European release adds a cutscene whose English translation is among the worst ever committed to ROM. The villain CATS announces: All your base are belong to us. The captain replies: For great justice. The lines circulate quietly in emulator scene chat through the late 1990s as a private joke about awful localisation. 02. Tribal War Photoshops The World In late 2000, the Tribal War gaming forum starts a thread Photoshopping the phrase onto everything: highway signs, the White House, the moon. A Flash video by user Bad_CRC, scored to a Laziest Men On Mars techno track, hits Newgrounds in February 2001 and the format crosses over into broadcast TV, USA Today, and a Wired feature within weeks. It is arguably the first image macro to dominate the wider internet from a single hour's worth of source material. The grammar of format a phrase, paste it on anything is the entire blueprint of 2010s meme culture, prefigured. Sources • Wired, 'It's the World's Bomb' (Tony Long, 23 February 2001) • Know Your Meme, 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' • USA Today, 'Net joke takes off, takes flight' (26 February 2001)
  7. — Future Crew's Second Reality. Date: 29 July 1993 · Place: Assembly demoparty, Helsinki · Figures: Future Crew, Finnish demogroup · Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen), music · Skaven (Peter Hajba), music · Psi (Sami Tammilehto), code · Marvel (Mika Tuomi), code · Tags: Demoscene, 486 PC, Real-Time Art 01. Eight Minutes On A 486 At the Assembly 1993 demoparty in Helsinki on 29 July, Future Crew premieres Second Reality, an eight-minute audiovisual demo that runs in real time on a 486 PC. Purple Motion and Skaven compose the soundtrack in Scream Tracker. Psi and Marvel write the code. The plasma effects, 3D vector cityscape, and Stargate-style tunnel sequence are computed live, not pre-rendered. It wins the PC demo competition by acclamation and is included on the cover CD of the October 1993 PC Format magazine, putting it on millions of home machines. 02. The First Native Internet Aesthetic The demoscene is the first artistic subculture born on Usenet and FTP, distributing executables through alt.binaries and Hornet Archive. Future Crew's members go on to found Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and Hummingbird Studio. Purple Motion scores Angry Birds films decades later. Second Reality is a Library of Congress-inducted artifact in 2020, the first demo so recognized. The grammar of the kinetic title sequence, the impossible camera move, the synchronized drop, descends from here. "We just wanted to make something that would make people in the hall stand up." — Sami 'Psi' Tammilehto, Future Crew, interview in Pelit magazine, 1993 Sources • Future Crew, Second Reality release notes (Assembly 1993) • Library of Congress, 'Selections to the National Recording Registry' announcement (March 2020) • Lassi Tasajarvi, 'Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time' (Even Lake Studios, 2004)
  8. — Eternal September. Date: 1 September 1993 · Place: Usenet, all hierarchies · Figures: America Online, gateway provider · Dave Fischer, coiner of the term · Tags: Usenet, Endemic Newbie, AOL 01. The September That Never Ended Every September, college freshmen got internet accounts and flooded Usenet with stupid questions; by October the upperclassmen had taught them the norms. On 1 September 1993, America Online opens a Usenet gateway to its subscribers, and the September cohort never stops arriving. The cycle of acculturation breaks. The term Eternal September is coined by Dave Fischer in a January 1994 post to alt.folklore.computers. It calcifies fast into Usenet's foundational defeat narrative. 02. The First Platform Collapse Narrative Every later platform inherits the structure. Digg dies when Reddit users flood it; Reddit oldheads watch newcomers arrive after every Apollo shutdown; Twitter veterans complain about Elon's people; bluesky has its own September. The Eternal September is the prototype of this place was better before you got here, and it dates to a specific morning. Sources • Dave Fischer, original post (alt.folklore.computers, 25 January 1994, Google Groups archive) • Wikipedia, 'Eternal September' • The Jargon File 4.4.7, entry 'September that never ended'
  9. — The Good Times Virus Hoax. Date: November 1994 · Place: AOL chat, then global email · Figures: Anonymous AOL user, originator · CIAC (US Department of Energy), official debunker · Tags: Hoax, Chain Email, Moral Panic 01. Do Not Open Any Email Titled Good Times A warning appears on AOL message boards in late November 1994. An email with the subject Good Times contains a virus that will erase your hard drive if you open it. The warning urges you to forward it to everyone you know. People do, by the million. There is no virus. There is no email titled Good Times. The warning itself is the payload. CIAC, the US Department of Energy's incident response team, publishes a formal debunk in December 1994; it does not help. 02. The First Self-Replicating Hoax Good Times is the first widely-studied example of a memetic virus in the strict Dawkinsian sense, an idea that hijacks human attention to replicate itself with no payload other than its own propagation. Every forward this to ten people chain email that follows works the same way. It also previews the entire grammar of internet fear: an unspecified harm, an authoritative-sounding warning, an instruction to spread. QAnon will use the same template thirty years later. Sources • CIAC Notice E-19, 'Good Times Virus Hoax' (US Department of Energy, December 1994) • Les Jones, 'Good Times Virus Hoax FAQ' (1995, archive.org) • Wikipedia, 'Good Times virus'
  10. — Carmack's .plan Files. Date: 1994 to 2000 · Place: id Software, Mesquite, Texas, via finger protocol · Figures: John Carmack, programmer, id Software · finger daemon, RFC 1288 · Tags: Finger, Dev Log, id Software 01. Finger johnc@idsoftware.com The finger protocol, RFC 1288, lets anyone on the internet type finger user@host and read that user's .plan file, a plain text file in their home directory. It is designed in the 1970s for telling colleagues where you went for lunch. John Carmack, lead programmer of Doom and Quake, uses it from 1994 onward as a public engineering diary. Carmack posts terse notes about renderer bugs, BSP tree optimizations, network protocol redesigns, and the occasional Ferrari acquisition. Fans mirror the .plan to Usenet within minutes of each update. 02. The First Dev Blog Carmack's .plan invents the public engineering postmortem as a genre. Quake's deathmatch netcode, the abandonment of the original Trinity engine, the decision to GPL Doom in 1999, all are announced first via finger. The format is read-only, no comments, no replies, a one-way broadcast from the workstation of the most influential graphics programmer alive. Blogs absorb the practice by 1999. By 2010 every studio has a dev blog. Carmack stops updating the .plan when he leaves id in 2013, but the archive at floodyberry.com preserves every entry. "I do most of my best programming work at four in the morning, fueled by Diet Coke and the knowledge that nobody is going to interrupt me." — John Carmack, .plan file, 1996 Sources • John Carmack .plan archive, mirrored at floodyberry.com • David Kushner, 'Masters of Doom' (Random House, 2003) • RFC 1288, 'The Finger User Information Protocol' (December 1991)
  11. — Free Kevin Stickers. Date: 15 February 1995 to 21 January 2000 · Place: Worldwide, via 2600 Magazine and laptop lids · Figures: Kevin Mitnick, hacker · Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley), editor of 2600 · Tsutomu Shimomura, security researcher · Tags: Hacker Culture, Sticker, 2600 01. Held Without Trial The FBI arrests Kevin Mitnick on 15 February 1995 in Raleigh, North Carolina, after a manhunt assisted by Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick is held without bail for four and a half years, eight months of it in solitary confinement, on the prosecutorial theory that he could start a nuclear war by whistling into a payphone. Emmanuel Goldstein at 2600 Magazine prints the first FREE KEVIN bumper stickers in 1995. They are distributed free at 2600 meetings on the first Friday of every month at payphones and food courts in dozens of cities. 02. The First Hacker Cause Celebre FREE KEVIN stickers cover laptop lids at every DEF CON from 1996 to 2000. The yellow-and-black livery is unmistakable. The freekevin.com site, the documentary Freedom Downtime (2001), and the New York Times opinion column by John Markoff that started the whole pursuit, become a generational litmus test. Mitnick is released on 21 January 2000. The stickers persist. They are the prototype for every laptop-lid political sticker that follows, from Snowden to Stallman. "Kevin Mitnick is in prison for downloading source code. He hurt nobody. Free Kevin." — 2600 Magazine editorial, Spring 1996 Sources • Jonathan Littman, 'The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick' (Little, Brown, 1996) • 2600 Magazine archive, Spring 1995 through Winter 1999-2000 • Emmanuel Goldstein, 'Freedom Downtime' documentary (2001)
  12. — GeoCities Neighborhoods. Date: 1995-1999 · Place: Beverly Hills, California (GeoCities HQ); SoHo, Area51, Heartland, etc. (virtual) · Figures: David Bohnett, founder, GeoCities · John Rezner, co-founder · Tags: Web 1.0, Themed Communities, Personal Homepage 01. Pick A Neighborhood David Bohnett launches Beverly Hills Internet in 1994, renames it GeoCities in 1995, and gives every user a free homepage filed under a themed neighborhood. SoHo is for artists. Area51 is for sci-fi. Heartland is for family content. The Tropics is for travel. You pick the neighborhood that fits your page, then claim a street address inside it. By 1999 GeoCities is the third most-visited domain on the web, with thirty-eight million pages. 02. The Last Time The Web Was A Place Neighborhoods give web 1.0 its specific aesthetic: tiled backgrounds, MIDI autoplay, welcome to my homepage, neighborhood-themed link rings. The geographic metaphor is taken literally, with community leaders moderating each district by hand. Yahoo buys GeoCities in January 1999 for $3.57 billion, kills the neighborhood structure in 2001, and shuts the whole thing down on 26 October 2009. The Archive Team rescues 650 GB of raw HTML in the final weeks. "Welcome to my page! This page is best viewed in Netscape Navigator at 800x600." — Canonical GeoCities homepage opener, c. 1996 Sources • Wired, 'GeoCities: A Pale Shadow of Its Former Self' (Bob Liu, 26 October 2009) • Archive Team, 'GeoCities' (archiveteam.org) • Olia Lialina, 'A Vernacular Web' (2005, contemporary.archive.org)
  13. — Under Construction GIFs. Date: 1995-1999 · Place: GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, personal homepages worldwide · Figures: Anonymous web 1.0 page builders · Animated GIF clip-art archives · Tags: Web 1.0 Aesthetic, Animated GIF, Eternal WIP 01. A Hard Hat And A Shovel By 1995 nearly every personal homepage on the web carries the same image: a tiny animated GIF of a man in a yellow hard hat digging, or a sawhorse, or a striped barricade. The label reads Under Construction. The pages are not under construction; they are finished. The GIF is decorative. 02. The Eternal Beta Tim Berners-Lee himself complains about them in 1996, calling the construction GIF the most overused image on the web. Clip-art archives like Andy's Art Attack distribute thousands of variations. They become the visual signature of an era that understands its own incompleteness as a feature. The aesthetic returns in 2020s vaporwave revivals and Neocities homepages, fully ironic, fully sincere. Sources • Olia Lialina, 'A Vernacular Web' (2005) • Tim Berners-Lee, 'Style Guide for Online Hypertext' (W3C, 1995) • Cameron's World (cameronsworld.net), curated GeoCities reconstruction (2015)
  14. — The Dancing Baby. Date: Autumn 1996, mainstream peak September 1998 · Place: Kinetix (Autodesk subsidiary), San Francisco · Ally McBeal, Fox Broadcasting · Figures: Michael Girard, 3D animator, Kinetix · Robert Lurye, animator · David E. Kelley, showrunner, Ally McBeal · Tags: Viral Video Precursor, 3D Animation, Forward This 01. A Character Studio Demo File Michael Girard and Robert Lurye build a sample animation for Character Studio, an Autodesk 3D Studio Max plugin, in autumn 1996. It is a diapered toddler doing the cha-cha in a void, included on the demo disc so animators can study motion-capture bone rigs. A LucasArts developer named Ron Lussier optimises the file, retitles it Baby Cha-Cha-Cha, and forwards it around. By summer 1997 it is forwarded around the entire AOL-using world as a .gif and as an .avi. 02. Crossover On Ally McBeal On 9 September 1998, the season premiere of Ally McBeal includes the Dancing Baby as a recurring hallucination representing Ally's biological clock. Network television acknowledges an internet meme on prime time, an early-historic milestone. Blue Swede's Hooked on a Feeling overlays the baby's dance. It is the first viral video in the modern sense: a file circulated independently of its origin, decoupled from authorship, mutated, captioned, broadcast back to its audience by mass media. Sources • The New York Times, 'The Dancing Baby Goes Mainstream' (Lisa Napoli, 11 September 1998) • Wired, 'Hooked on a Feeling' (Steve Silberman, 13 August 1998) • Know Your Meme, 'Dancing Baby'
  15. — The ICQ Uh-Oh. Date: November 1996 · Place: Mirabilis, Tel Aviv, Israel · Figures: Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, co-founders, Mirabilis · Tags: Audio Meme, Chat Client, Pavlovian 01. Two Syllables That Owned The 90s Mirabilis launches ICQ in November 1996 out of a Tel Aviv apartment. The client plays a two-syllable sample, uh-oh, whenever a message arrives. The voice is recorded in-house and never credited on the splash screen. Within two years it is one of the most-recognised audio cues on Earth. 02. Sound As Trigger It is the first audio meme of the consumer internet, predating MSN Messenger nudges and Skype rings by years. AOL acquires Mirabilis in June 1998 for $407 million, largely on the strength of brand recognition that the uh-oh sample built unaided. Users who installed ICQ as teenagers in 1997 can still summon the sample from memory. Pavlovian conditioning shipped as a default notification. Sources • TechCrunch, 'The Rise and Fall of ICQ' (Steve O'Hear, 2010) • Wikipedia, 'ICQ' • Haaretz, 'How Four Israelis Created ICQ' (28 May 2014)
  16. — Mr. T Ate My Balls. Date: 1996 · Place: GeoCities (RodeoDrive/1234), USA · Figures: Nehal Patel, originator, college student · Tags: Image Macro Ancestor, GeoCities, Format Franchise 01. The First Format Franchise In 1996, Nehal Patel, a student at the University of Illinois, makes a GeoCities page consisting of scanned photos of Mr. T with crude captions like I ate your balls. The page goes around campus, then around the early web. Within months there are Alf Ate My Balls, Oprah Ate My Balls, Pikachu Ate My Balls, and hundreds more, each on its own GeoCities page. 02. Format Over Content It is the first internet franchise based purely on a swappable variable. The grammar is celebrity image + ate my balls caption. Change the celebrity, keep the format, get a new page. This is the structural skeleton of every image macro to follow, from LOLCats to Distracted Boyfriend. Wired covers the phenomenon in 1997 in a piece titled The Balls That Ate The Internet, the first time a mainstream tech magazine tries to explain a meme-of-memes. Sources • Wired, 'The Balls That Ate The Internet' (Steve Silberman, January 1997) • Know Your Meme, 'Mr. T Ate My Balls' • Archive.org Wayback, RodeoDrive/1234 GeoCities snapshots (1996-1998)
  17. — The Heaven's Gate Website. Date: 26 March 1997 · Place: Rancho Santa Fe, California · Figures: Marshall Applewhite, leader · Heaven's Gate (group) · Tags: Cult Artefact, Web 1.0, Time Capsule 01. Red Alert On 26 March 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group are found dead in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion, having taken phenobarbital and vodka in expectation of being collected by a spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. Their website, heavensgate.com, has been online since 1995. On the day of the deaths it carries a flashing RED ALERT banner over an animated starfield. Surviving members commit to keeping the site online in perpetuity. Two of them, Mark and Sarah, answer email from HeavensGate@heavensgate.com for the next 28 years. 02. A Frozen Page The site is preserved exactly as it was on 26 March 1997: tiled cosmic backgrounds, multiple frames, bright-blue Comic Sans, Java applet starfield, autoplaying MIDI. It is the most-visited untouched web 1.0 artefact on Earth, treated as both shrine and forensic document. It also marks the first time mass-suicide-by-cult is staged with the internet as the intended posthumous publishing channel. The pages are part of the message. Sources • The New York Times, 'Web Site Lives On as Mass Suicide's Last Will' (Pam Belluck, 28 March 1997) • heavensgate.com (preserved 1995-present) • Benjamin E. Zeller, 'Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Religion' (NYU Press, 2014)
  18. — Slashdot Launches. Date: 5 October 1997 · Place: Holland, Michigan, then Hope College dorm room · Figures: Rob Malda (CmdrTaco), founder · Jeff Bates (Hemos), co-founder · Kurt Gray, early developer · Tags: News Aggregator, Comment Moderation, Geek Culture 01. News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters Rob Malda registers slashdot.org on 5 October 1997 from his dorm room at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. The site is a hand-written Perl CGI aggregating Linux news, Star Wars rumors, and Carmack .plan updates. Jeff Bates joins within weeks as Hemos. The tagline, 'News for nerds, stuff that matters', is unironic. Threaded comments arrive in 1998 with the M1/M2 metamoderation system, the first serious attempt at distributed community moderation on the open web. Karma points, score thresholds, and the +5 Insightful tag enter the lexicon. 02. Imagine A Beowulf Cluster Of These Slashdot generates two enduring memes by 1998. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these is the canonical comment on any new piece of hardware. Frist psot is the corrupted spelling of the race for the first comment. In Soviet Russia, car drives you spreads from Slashdot via Yakov Smirnoff revivals. The Slashdot Effect, the traffic spike that crashes any small site linked from the front page, is the first widely-recognized DDoS-by-popularity. The phrase enters technical English permanently. "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these." — Anonymous Coward, Slashdot comment, repeated thousands of times from 1998 onward Sources • Rob Malda, 'Slashdot: 10 Years' retrospective (slashdot.org, 5 October 2007) • Andrew Leonard, 'Free Software Project' (Salon, 1999) • Wendy Grossman, 'net.wars' (NYU Press, 1997)
  19. — Bert Is Evil. Date: 1997-2001 · Place: Fractalcow.com, Manila, Philippines · Figures: Dino Ignacio, web designer, Manila · Tags: Photoshop, Webby Award, Format Franchise 01. Bert With Hitler Dino Ignacio, a 22-year-old web designer in Manila, launches Bert Is Evil in 1997. The site Photoshops Sesame Street's Bert into the company of history's worst people: Hitler, the Unabomber, Pol Pot. The bit is that Bert's face is unchanged, his expression always faintly disapproving, and yet the juxtaposition reads as confession. It wins a Webby Award for Best Weird Site in 1998. 02. Bert With Bin Laden In October 2001, a Bangladeshi printer pulls a Bert-with-Bin-Laden image off Google for an anti-American protest poster. Reuters photographs the poster being carried in a Dhaka street demonstration. The photo runs worldwide. Sesame Workshop releases a statement; Ignacio shuts the site down voluntarily, fearing for his safety. It is the first incident of a meme escaping the internet, getting laundered through global news photography, and reaching the audience that originally made it as a stranger. Sources • BBC News, 'Sesame Street's Bert linked to Bin Laden' (11 October 2001) • Dino Ignacio, statement on fractalcow.com (October 2001, archive.org) • Know Your Meme, 'Bert Is Evil'
  20. — The Bill Gates Bonus Chain Email. Date: 1997 · Place: Global email, originator unknown · Figures: Anonymous originator · Bill Gates, unwilling protagonist · Tags: Hoax, Chain Email, Bait 01. Microsoft Is Tracking This Email In 1997 an email begins circulating claiming Microsoft is beta-testing an email tracing program. Forward the message to enough friends and Bill Gates will personally send you a cheque, plus a copy of Windows 98. The numbers escalate by variant: $245, then $1,000, then $5,000 per forward, sometimes a trip to Disney World. It is the second viral hoax to dominate mainstream inboxes, after Good Times, and the first to use greed rather than fear as the propagation engine. 02. The Format Outlives Email Microsoft denies it formally, repeatedly, for over a decade. The forwards keep coming. Versions are still being shared on WhatsApp in 2018. The template, a powerful entity is secretly rewarding people who share this, becomes the spine of every Facebook share-to-win scam and every say amen chain post. It is the moment forwarding becomes its own reward structure, dopamine via sent-mail folder. Sources • Snopes, 'Bill Gates Money Giveaway' (first logged October 1997) • Microsoft official statement (microsoft.com/presspass, 1999) • Wired, 'Why Won't This Email Hoax Die?' (Brian McWilliams, 4 January 2002)
  21. — The Hampster Dance. Date: August 1998 (launched), peaks 1999 · Place: GeoCities, Canada · Figures: Deidre LaCarte, art student, Vancouver · Tags: Web 1.0, GIF Loop, Earworm 01. A Tribute To A Hamster Deidre LaCarte, a Vancouver art student, builds a GeoCities page in August 1998 as a tribute to her hamster Hampton. The page contains four rows of dancing animated-GIF hamsters and a looping sample from the Disney film Robin Hood: a sped-up clip of Roger Miller singing Whistle Stop. It is part of an informal traffic-building competition with her sister and a friend. By March 1999 the page is getting 14 million visits a month. LaCarte registers hampsterdance.com. 02. Hampton The Hampster Hits The Charts A Canadian production duo licenses the loop in 1999, expands it into a full novelty single credited to Hampton the Hampster, and releases The Hampsterdance Song in 2000. It hits the top 20 in the UK and Australia and goes platinum. The misspelling of hamster as hampster, originally a typo, becomes a load-bearing canonical detail. It is the first time a personal GeoCities page produces a chart-topping single. The whole arc, from one art student's birthday gift to a Hot 100 entry, takes 18 months. Sources • Wired, 'Hampsters on Parade' (Lindsey Arent, 16 March 1999) • The Globe and Mail, 'How a Vancouver student created a global hit' (3 February 2000) • Know Your Meme, 'Hampster Dance'
  22. — Fark.com Launches. Date: 1 April 1999 · Place: Lexington, Kentucky · Figures: Drew Curtis, founder · Squidly the Fark squirrel mascot · Tags: Weird News, Photoshop, Headline Tag 01. It's Not News, It's Fark Drew Curtis launches Fark.com on 1 April 1999 from Lexington, Kentucky, as a personal dumping ground for the weird news links his friends keep emailing him. Within a year it has a submission queue, a moderator team, and the iconic green tag system: Florida, Stupid, Asinine, Cool, Hero, PSA, Photoshop. The Florida tag, applied to any story involving Florida Man before Florida Man is a Twitter account, codifies a regional joke into a national one. 02. Photoshop Contests As Folk Form Fark's Photoshop contests, launched in 1999, are the first sustained mass-participation image-manipulation events on the open web. A weekly thread posts a source image, users submit edits, the funniest go to the front page. The format trains a decade of meme-makers in compositing before image-macro generators exist. By 2003 Fark serves four million daily users. The site is older than 9/11, older than Google's IPO, and is still owned by Drew Curtis from Lexington. It is the longest-running independently-owned major aggregator on the English-speaking web. "It's not news, it's Fark." — Drew Curtis, Fark.com tagline, 1999 Sources • Drew Curtis, 'It's Not News, It's Fark' (Gotham Books, 2007) • Fark.com 10-year retrospective post (1 April 2009) • Wired, 'The Drew Curtis Interview' (April 2003)
  23. — Mahir Çağrı: I Kiss You. Date: August 1999 · Place: İzmir, Turkey · Figures: Mahir Çağrı, journalist and accordion player · Tags: Personal Homepage, Accidental Virality, Pre-Influencer 01. I Like Sex Mahir Çağrı, a 36-year-old Turkish journalist and accordion player living in İzmir, builds a homepage on a Sezer Internet server in November 1998. It contains photographs of him in a Speedo, playing accordion, and beside a Mercedes. The captions, in broken English, are sincere: I like sex, Welcome to my home page!!!!!!!!!, I kiss you!!!!!. It is, by any measure he intends, a personal page meant to attract pen-friends. In August 1999 someone on a US forum links it as a joke. Within a month it has millions of visitors. 02. The Subject Becomes The Author Mahir is the first person in internet history to be made famous by his own page being passed around to mock him, and the first to successfully reclaim it. He flies to the US, appears on Letterman, releases a single, gets a column in a Turkish newspaper, and runs for the Istanbul parliament. He is the prototype of the involuntary internet celebrity, and the prototype of the involuntary internet celebrity who pivots, with grace and a complete lack of self-consciousness, into the role. "WELLCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!! I KISS YOU !!!!!" — Mahir Çağrı, ikissyou.org, c. November 1998 Sources • The Independent, 'Mahir: the man who kissed the world' (Justin Huggler, 22 January 2000) • Wired, 'Turkey's Cyber-Citizen' (Steve Kettmann, 26 January 2000) • Know Your Meme, 'I Kiss You (Mahir Cagri)'
  24. — DeCSS Haiku And T-Shirts. Date: October 1999 · Place: Norway and the open web · Figures: Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon), 15-year-old programmer, Larvik, Norway · Seth Schoen, EFF, author of '42.zip is not a virus' DeCSS Haiku · MPAA, plaintiff · Tags: Crypto, Free Speech, T-Shirt 01. 456 Lines Of C In October 1999, 15-year-old Jon Lech Johansen in Larvik, Norway, releases DeCSS, a 456-line C program that decrypts the Content Scramble System used on commercial DVDs. He just wants to watch DVDs on his Linux laptop. The MPAA files suit in New York under the new DMCA, the first major test of the 1998 law. Judge Lewis Kaplan rules in 2000 that publishing the DeCSS source code is illegal. The web responds by translating DeCSS into every conceivable form. 02. Haiku, T-Shirts, Prime Numbers Seth Schoen writes the DeCSS Haiku, 465 stanzas of formally-correct haiku that compile, in spirit, to the DeCSS algorithm. The code is printed on T-shirts sold by Copyleft. The 1,401-digit Phil Carmody prime, whose binary representation is the gzipped DeCSS source, is published as a prime number that is also illegal speech. The DeCSS T-shirt becomes the uniform of every 2600 meeting and Defcon hallway from 1999 to 2003. Free-speech case law catches up in 2001 when the Norwegian acquittal of Johansen establishes that reverse-engineering for interoperability is legal in Norway. Johansen later co-founds doubleTwist and works on iTunes interop. "Now help me, my friends, / Cluster many minds in code / And lay legal traps." — Seth Schoen, 'DeCSS Haiku' stanza 3, March 2001 Sources • Seth Schoen, 'DeCSS Haiku' full text, EFF archive (March 2001) • Universal v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) • Norwegian Supreme Court, Johansen acquittal (5 January 2004)
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