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schwit1 quotes the Mercury News: In an explosive new allegation, a renowned architect has accused Google of racketeering, saying in a lawsuit the company has a pattern of stealing trade secrets from people it first invites to collaborate. Architect Eli Attia spent 50 years developing what his lawsuit calls "game-changing new technology" for building construction. Google in 2010 struck a deal to work with him on commercializing it as software, and Attia moved with his family from New York to Palo Alto to focus on the initiative, code-named "Project Genie." The project was undertaken in Google's secretive "Google X" unit for experimental "moonshots."

But then Google and its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "plotted to squeeze Attia out of the project" and pretended to kill it but used Attia's technology to "surreptitiously" spin off Project Genie into a new company, according to the lawsuit... This week, a judge in Santa Clara County Superior Court approved the addition of racketeering claims to the lawsuit originally filed in 2014. Attia's legal team uncovered six other incidents in which Google had engaged in a "substantially similar fact pattern of misappropriation of trade secrets" from other people or companies, according to a July 25 legal filing from Attia.
Wired reported yesterday that Project Loon -- also a Google X project -- "is embroiled in a lawsuit with Space Data, a small company accusing Alphabet of patent infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract following a failed acquisition bid."

The lawyer for the racketeering suit complains Google can deploy a "virtually unlimited budget to fight these things in court."

"I was trained more as a linguist than a computer scientist," says Perl creator Larry Wall, "and some people would say it shows." An anonymous reader describes Wall's new video interview up on InfoQ: "With a natural language, you learn it as you go," Wall says. "You're not expected to know the whole language at once. It's okay to have dialects... Natural languages evolve over time, and they don't have arbitrary limits. They naturally cover multiple paradigms. There are external influences on style... It has fractal dimensionality to it. Easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible. And, you know, if you get really good at it, you can even speak CompSci."

Wall also touched on the long delay for the release of Perl 6. "In the year 2000, we said 'Maybe it's time to break backward compatibility, just once. Maybe we can afford to do that, get off the worse-is-worse cycle, crank the thing once for a worse-is-better cycle." The development team received a whopping 361 suggestions -- and was also influenced by Paul Graham's essay on the 100-year language. "We put a lot of these ideas together and thought really hard, and came up with a whole bunch of principles in the last 15 years." Among the pithy principles: "Give the user enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, but hide the rope in the corner," and "Encapsulate cleverness, then reuse the heck out of it.."

But Wall emphasized the flexibility and multi-paradigm nature that they finally implemented in Perl 6. "The thing we really came up with was... There really is no one true language. Not even Perl 6, because Perl 6 itself is a braid of sublanguages -- slangs for short -- and they interact with each other, and you can modify each part of the braid..."
Wall even demoed a sigil-less style, and argued that Perl 6 was everything from "expressive" and "optimizable" to "gradually-typed" and "concurrency aware," while supporting multiple virtual machines. He also notes that Perl 6 borrows powerful features from other languages, including Haskell (lazy evaluation) Smalltalk (traits), Go (promises and channels), and C# (functional reactive programming).

And towards the end of the interview Wall remembers how the original release of Perl was considered by some as a violation of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. "I was already on my rebellious slide into changing the world at that point."

It's now possible to buy a 7-inch Android tablet for under $50 -- for example, the Nook Tablet 7 or Amazon's cheapest Fire tablet. "Since the Fire can now easily install regular Android apps, it has become useful out of all proportion to its price," writes long-time Slashdot reader Robotech_Master, noting that for many applications tablets can replace a desktop or laptop computer. TeleRead.org is even arguing this could be what bridges the digital divide: [N]ot just for reading ebooks and assisting in education, but for more basic tasks. People with low or no incomes could search and apply for better jobs. Students could do homework and term papers on their tablet if their siblings or parents are using the desktop.
Besides the obvious applications like email and web browsing, $50 Android tablets also offer cheap phone calls via Google Hangouts. (You can even get your own phone number through Google Voice.) Calling the tablets "a full-fledged internet terminal... easily within reach of even the lowest-income families," the article concludes "I can hardly wait to see where these tablets go from here."

It's now possible to buy a 7-inch Android tablet for under $50 -- for example, the Nook Tablet 7 or Amazon's cheapest Fire tablet. "Since the Fire can now easily install regular Android apps, it has become useful out of all proportion to its price," writes long-time Slashdot reader Robotech_Master, noting that for many applications tablets can replace a desktop or laptop computer. TeleRead.org is even arguing this could be what bridges the digital divide: [N]ot just for reading ebooks and assisting in education, but for more basic tasks. People with low or no incomes could search and apply for better jobs. Students could do homework and term papers on their tablet if their siblings or parents are using the desktop.
Besides the obvious applications like email and web browsing, $50 Android tablets also offer cheap phone calls via Google Hangouts. (You can even get your own phone number through Google Voice.) Calling the tablets "a full-fledged internet terminal... easily within reach of even the lowest-income families," the article concludes "I can hardly wait to see where these tablets go from here."

Last month, it was reported that T-Mobile is close to agreeing tentative terms on a deal to merge with Sprint. Now, it appears that negotiations between the two companies are almost complete. Android Police reports: The report claims that Sprint and T-Mobile are putting the finishing touches on the merger, which will likely be announced at the quarterly earnings report at the end of this month. Some of the current discussion topics include Sprint's valuation (estimated to be around $29 billion), the location of the combined company's headquarters, and appointments to the executive management team. The merge is not expected to include a breakup/termination fee, meaning if one company backed out of the deal, there would be no financial penalty. This would align both companies to lobby government regulators for approval without any conflicts of interest. After AT&T called off its buyout of T-Mobile in 2011 due to government opposition, the company paid a $4 billion breakup fee to T-Mobile, which helped strengthen T-Mobile as a competitor. The report notes that while T-Mobile and Sprint's quarterly earnings reports have not been set, T-Mobile's was on October 24 last year, and Sprint's was the next day.

A fresh case of Apple's new iPhone popping open due to a swollen battery has been reported in state media in China, the world's biggest smartphone market where the U.S. firm is seeking to revive faltering sales. From a report: The incident comes as Apple investigates similar cases reported in Taiwan and Japan of batteries in its latest iPhone 8 Plus becoming bloated, causing the device's casing to open. On its website on Thursday, China's state-backed ThePaper.cn cited an iPhone buyer surnamed Liu as saying his newly purchased iPhone 8 Plus arrived cracked open on Oct. 5. There was no sign of scorching or an explosion. Liu told ThePaper he bought the handset through online marketplace of JD.com. He said he did not charge the new device and returned it to the seller. The fresh reports comes on the heels of another story last week where Apple claimed that it was looking into a similar matter.

Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.

Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.

Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.

Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.

Last month, we covered a story about how turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in iOS 11's Control Center doesn't really turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. EFF has called the situation bad for user security. From the report: Instead, what actually happens in iOS 11 when you toggle your quick settings to "off" is that the phone will disconnect from Wi-Fi networks and some devices, but remain on for Apple services. Location Services is still enabled, Apple devices (like Apple Watch and Pencil) stay connected, and services such as Handoff and Instant Hotspot stay on. Apple's UI fails to even attempt to communicate these exceptions to its users. It gets even worse. When you toggle these settings in the Control Center to what is best described as "off-ish," they don't stay that way. The Wi-Fi will turn back full-on if you drive or walk to a new location. And both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will turn back on at 5:00 AM. This is not clearly explained to users, nor left to them to choose, which makes security-aware users vulnerable as well. The only way to turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios is to enable Airplane Mode or navigate into Settings and go to the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sections. When a phone is designed to behave in a way other than what the UI suggests, it results in both security and privacy problems. A user has no visual or textual clues to understand the device's behavior, which can result in a loss of trust in operating system designers to faithfully communicate what's going on.

Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has hit back at a report in the Wall Street Journal which accused it of being involved in a Russian government hack of an NSA contractor in 2015. From a report: The paper reported on Thursday that the NSA contractor, a Vietnamese national who was working to create replacements for the hacking tools leaked by Edward Snowden, was hacked on his personal computer after he took his work home. There, the report says, the contractor's use of Kaspersky's antivirus software "alerted Russian hackers to the presence of files that may have been taken from the NSA." Once the machine was in their sights, the Russian hackers infiltrated it and obtained a significant amount of data, according to the paper. Calling the allegations "like the script of a C movie," Eugene Kaspersky, the infosec firm's founder, gave his own explanation of what might have happened. Mr Kaspersky vehemently denied that his company had played any active role in the breach, noting: "We never betray the trust that our users put into our hands. If we would do that a single time that would be immediately spotted by the industry and our business would be done." Instead, he implied that the root of the problem was that Kaspersky Lab had correctly identified the hacking tools the contractor was working on as malware -- perhaps through Kaspersky Lab's own research into the Equation Group, a "sophisticated cyber espionage platform" believed to be linked to the NSA.

After Puerto Rico was hit by hurricane Maria, Tesla quickly started shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries there to try and get power back on to some houses with solar arrays. Now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to say that Tesla could rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid with batteries and solar on a bigger scale. Electrek reports: Puerto Rico's electricity rates were already quite high at around $0.20 per kWh and reliant on fossil fuels. After it was pointed out that Puerto Rico's destroyed grid is an opportunity to build a better one, Musk wrote on Twitter: "The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit so it can be done for Puerto Rico too. Such a decision would be in the hands of the Puerto Rico government, PUC (Public Utilities Commission), any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of Puerto Rico."

Musk is referring to solar and battery projects that Tesla recently deployed on other islands, like Tesla's visually stunning Powerpack and solar project in Kauai. Those projects power grids for much smaller populations, but Musk has always said that it's scalable to support much larger islands, like Puerto Rico, and ultimately entire continents, which are just like big islands to a certain degree. The thing is that those systems are still reliant on power lines for larger communities and devices, like solar panels and wind turbines, that are still subject to problems with natural disasters. The advantage of Tesla's solution is that it has the potential to be distributed, which increases the odds of at least some systems staying online or bringing some back online quicker.

After Puerto Rico was hit by hurricane Maria, Tesla quickly started shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries there to try and get power back on to some houses with solar arrays. Now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to say that Tesla could rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid with batteries and solar on a bigger scale. Electrek reports: Puerto Rico's electricity rates were already quite high at around $0.20 per kWh and reliant on fossil fuels. After it was pointed out that Puerto Rico's destroyed grid is an opportunity to build a better one, Musk wrote on Twitter: "The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit so it can be done for Puerto Rico too. Such a decision would be in the hands of the Puerto Rico government, PUC (Public Utilities Commission), any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of Puerto Rico."

Musk is referring to solar and battery projects that Tesla recently deployed on other islands, like Tesla's visually stunning Powerpack and solar project in Kauai. Those projects power grids for much smaller populations, but Musk has always said that it's scalable to support much larger islands, like Puerto Rico, and ultimately entire continents, which are just like big islands to a certain degree. The thing is that those systems are still reliant on power lines for larger communities and devices, like solar panels and wind turbines, that are still subject to problems with natural disasters. The advantage of Tesla's solution is that it has the potential to be distributed, which increases the odds of at least some systems staying online or bringing some back online quicker.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.

While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.

Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.

As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.

Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.

One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.

It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?

On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.

The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.

We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.