The older the internet gets, the more it's like a city that keeps building on top of its own ruins. What's is your favorite bit of internet archeology if memes are like artifacts and relics?
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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An early Slashdot meme: Can you Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These (usually about things other than computers).
Searching Slashdot comments seems hard now that search engines aren't what they used to be, but I found a post referencing the by then pre-existing meme from the 14th of July, 2001: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/Can-You-Imagine-a-Beowulf-Cluster-of-These
This was probably one of my earliest exposures to Internet joke memes (before they were commonly in image form).
Of course, in Dawkin's original sense, any knowledge passed from human to human is a meme, so if we are being hyper-literal about it, I'd say it's actually how to talk - we all may have mutant variants of the meme and some may have multiple copies (multilingual), but without have caught some variant of that meme, no one would achieve much! But to meet the 'dead' part, I guess it would have to be a dead variant of the meme (possibly still and ancestor of modern languages). Proto-Indo-European is one such (although hard to choose just one).
I had forgotten about that one.
Slashdot was really something. I guess it still is, technically they are still a going concern. But long before things like reddit, Facebook, Myspace, etc.
5 digit UID here. I spent many hours browsing /..
Man, I unironically loved when someone would try to brag about their low UID only for a parade of ever lower UID people to comment for the first time in years. They only awoke from their slumber to shame someone :)
FWIW, I also had a low 5 digit UID, but I never dared make that mistake and disturb the Slashdot undead.
Are you familiar with the concept of a "fish story", in which someone tells you of a fish that they almost caught that was SO BIG, but it got away, so they don't have any proof?
I had a very low digit Slashdot ID, but I forgot the password and the free email provider I'd used shut down so I can't rescue it. I guess that's a Slashdot fish story.
FWIW, I also don't have my slashdot account anymore. They were dead to me the moment CmdrTaco sold the site roughly 15 years ago, so I never bothered to migrate my account to a new email. I don't think it is unreasonable to no longer have an account on a website from that long ago, if anything, it is surprising that Slashdot still exists in any form.
oooh yeah, I vaguely remember the whole site taking on a significant tone-shift at some point. I think it was just before Columbine, bc when that happened I remember some new non-tech-guy doing a whole series of multi-part posts on it. Eventually after that I faded away from it.
I just checked it out and yeah it's still there, chugging along.