Slashdot Mirror
A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips
In the summer of 1997 I was contacted by a stranger out of the blue with a kind of random offer. During the previous school year Nate Oostendorp (who now works with SourceForge, Inc. while working on his Masters) had coded a Space Invaders clone. He wrote a Java sprite library, and I wrote the game and illustrated the alien armada. This guy had an old DEC Alpha Multia 166, and a client that wanted to remake the game with popcorn instead of aliens. So I drew the popcorn up, replaced the gifs, and he mailed me my first non x86 box since the 286 I got in middle school. (Later Sun sent me legal threats forcing me to take the game offline since it was called Java Invaders, and clearly this was an evil crime against the universe. My hatred for Java has never died since that moment.)
I immediately installed Red Hat on it. I was working at an ad agency called The Image Group at the time as a webmaster. I coded whatever needed doing and handled various admin tasks to keep their clients happy. At the time they needed full control over email addresses on the domains they built. Since they shared their mailserver with their ISP, there were frequent name collisions -- if the client wanted bob@theirdomain.com but there already was a bob on the system, they couldn't do it. They agreed to let me move my little Alpha onto their network to host their email... and I could use it to fart around with on my personal hobbies.
I named the box Ariel. It sat under my desk. I learned enough Perl to write a stupid simple CMS to replace the functionality of Chips & Dips, which up until that point was just a text file. Dave DeMaagd wrote a simple comment system. Since we both had a long history with BBSes, it seemed obvious to us that there needed to be a discussion system. There were no user accounts -- you entered whatever name you wanted each time you posted. If you left it blank, it auto-filled the space with the name 'Anonymous Coward', a title that stuck and spread throughout the net.
The original system was written in Perl because I wanted to learn more Perl. All the data storage was flat text files. (We lost most of the original stories during a data import a year or so later) The files were named like 0000001.shtml and so forth and were all rendered at time of page request. Best of all, since the system was written as a CGI, the whole script needed to be compiled every time there was a page request. It was months before I ported the whole thing to use MySQL and mod_Perl.
I registered the domain name Slashdot.org as a joke. It was 'org' because I didn't want a .com -- those were so common. I always thought org would be cooler, and besides, I had no commercial plans in mind. (Years later this bit me on the ass since someone else registered the .com. Doh!) The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing. Jeff 'Hemos' Bates (now a VP of something or other with SourceForge, Inc.) was in the living room when I was registering the domain name. We all wanted email addresses with a unique domain name that wasn't attached to our school, so he chipped in on the registration fee.
When it came time to design the website's look, I took elements from a theme we had designed at The Image Group -- Paul Hart and I spent hours on it -- that was supposed to be the new website for the company, but it was passed on for another look. I still liked it, so I redesigned it more to my personal aesthetics (choosing #006666 as the dominant green replacing an earth tone green) and putting drop shadows all over everything (a habit I still haven't broken, and for which I am still mocked). Within days, most of the design elements you see on Slashdot were in place... the curves, the greens, the polls, the vertical list of stories so common in 2007, and, of course, discussions on each story.
And Slashdot was born. At first it had just a few thousand daily readers migrating over from Chips & Dips, but in a matter of weeks it had grown so fast that we started really having fun with it. One night we put up a poll asking how many shots Kurt 'The Pope' DeMaagd should drink. (Kurt later became our defacto HR man when we formed Blockstackers... today he is a professor at MSU.) But that night, Slashdot readers told him to take a dozen shots of alcohol -- he failed, but he tried.
I remember around the same time just watching 'tail -f' on the access_log. My world was rocked over and over again as I watched the domain names... mit.com! ibm.com! redhat.com! Hell, even microsoft.com kept scrolling through the log. I knew we had something... people from around the world, from the highest institutions in the land, from the biggest companies in the tech sector and to the most influential in the Linux world were all reading Slashdot. In fact, they were posting comments... as were a lot of people. It became commonplace to see hundreds of comments on stories, and the so-called 'Slashdot Effect' slowly grew into our lexicon as site after site buckled under our links.
In those days the content was a lot more personal then it is today. Stories would frequently refer to alcohol-related activities. I'd constantly mention that I had to leave to go to class so there wouldn't be more stories posted for a few hours. And when a professor in my pottery class assigned homework of to mass produce and sell some pottery as a lesson in being a commercial artist, I posted it, and ended up getting over 100 requests to buy my shitty mugs (all glazed teal ;) In the end I never did sell them -- I fulfilled the assignment locally. I think I still have one of those mugs left but I'm not sure- over the years my mediocre ceramics have been filtered out of a home increasingly tastefully decorated by my wife.
I continued to go to class and work my part time job. Ariel soon had loads so great that the machine was unusable during the day. And occasionally I would accidentally kick it and knock out a cable, bringing the machine offline. Soon after it saturated the office T1, I started realizing that there was no way I was going to be able to do this as "Just" a hobby. Essentially, every second of my life was consumed without time for a break. I'd go to class -- and often just work on Slashdot in the back row. (This was the first year we had computers at our desks in the CS dept at Hope.) My classwork suffered. On the upside, I became far more proficient at webwork, which really helped the part time job. I'd go home and code, post stories, reply to email until 2-3 a.m. and repeat it the next day. It was going to eventually be a full time job, requiring revenue and infrastructure that didn't exist back then. But I guess that's another story.
'Cause CnD was a top-hit on AltaVista for "WindowMaker" and "Enlightenment".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If it isn't David Copperfield...
;)
Just post the entire text of War and Peace and get it over with.
I write bullshit
I hope this starts a new trend for the 2nd decade of Slashdot?
Last time I touched it, it was indeed gray.
C|N>K
Yes, Slashdot had some strange preoccupations in the early(*) days... every other story seemed to be about a new development release of Enlightenment (and a bit later some cheesy themes.org upload) or the 2.1 Linux kernel.
Wait a sec - I think I probably prefer that to the speculation and corporate soap opera / press releases that clog up the front page these days.
(*) Not that early. I started reading when Netscape announced their plans to free their web browser.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
...this thread is useless without pics =)
Low ID Roll call!!!
I figured this was necessary to get all the old chaps from the CnD days out.
Don't hold my high ID against me. I waited until the last minute to sign up for an account.
DEC Alpha Multia 166 oh man that was the first web server I ever built. I also used Red Hat ahhh good times good times I ran it on the brand new highspeed internet in Alexandria VA Jones cable (bought by Comcast) only one of 300 using it. The cable modem was heaver than the DEC hudge! I still have it in a box some where bouth the cable modem and the DEC
But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.
Before the signal-to-noise ratio was so low, before ads, before the need for accounts...
It was a simpler, friendlier time.
Sniff.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
This great opus can't be considered all-inclusive unless you mention the 'incident with the bird'.
Slashcode would be the perfect system for objective community filtering if it weren't for the ID system, which only drags it back down to the level of any other clique-dominated web forum.
Fuck your low ID, and fuck your shitty elitism. Good job ruining slashdot.
As someone who only started reading Slashdot about 3 years ago, reading the history is extremely interesting. Thank you for posting this.
I'm looking forward to the future Slashdot stories later this week!
I don't know how many times in the last 4 or 5 years I've killed an hour "reading a story on /." And even though time is the most precious resource, the hours of reading were generally worth it. *Much* more enjoyable than work. :)
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
you are my hero. if it weren't for the anonymous coward, this site wouldn't be half as fun. lets forget the fact the lower user id people made this place what it is. have you checked the original parent posters comment list? more +5 than I can count.
CmdrTaco? Is that you?
If so, I'm sorry. I know you resisted the idea of navel gazing... but I never imagined it would spawn so much self-loathing!
The service is not available. Please try again later. We've slashdotted slashdot! Cue universe implosion.
Oh, man, another hilarious post! excellent! keep 'em coming! how do you think this stuff up?
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Digg overtakes Slashdot...
... can't wait ...
maybe in part II
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What's slashdot? ;-)
Well, no, it's not that.
Really, it's because youth suck.
I will grant to you that my reminiscing was perhaps not the most informative comment, however as a comment to a reminiscent article I don't feel it is out-of-place.
If slashdot hid userids, I would not alter how I comment at all.
Do you think your profanity-laden post counts as a contribution? Your complaints that people who have been here longer are respected -- have you considered that perhaps the people who have been visiting technology forums for ten years are perhaps the best-informed and most interested in technology?
Maybe I'm not the stupid one. Certainly not stupid enough to get very upset about an Anonymous Coward. AC's have usually had little to contribute, even from the very beginning.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I was actually hoping you'd start writing about /. especially since I wasn't around here back then at the beginning. Certainly do write more, either about the CnD transformation or just random stories that are somehow related to CnD or /.. It feels like there should be enough material for a small book, let alone a series of short articles.
And, since I missed the original anniversary story, congratulations!
(:-) for the humor impaired.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Lame joke of the decade award or something?
I admit it, I'm a UID whore. On my WELL account, I have it check /etc/passwd to see how many people still exist that have accounts older than me. It's down to 137 or so. I -will- be the longest-running-continuous-e-mail-account some day! I will! (20 years next April.) So I've always been kind of disgusted that I waited to sign up at Slashdot -- though the irony is, I never saw C&D. But I do remember the no-user-account-at-all days quite well; it's a shame the old pages are lost...
Chill man, he's trying to tell us all the story of how you got your nickname.
since no one has yet pointed out... one of the best things about the way /. has developed is we now get to read comments like this. where would we be without them ???
Whoa, slow down there, George Jetson. When I first started reading Slashdot I had to send a telegraph to 'the server' to request a page. It would be sent by carrier pigeon. When it arrived I sent it to my crack team of designers who would 'interpret' the 'HTML codes' and then load the document into my printing press. If all went well and nobody was maimed, I'd have a fresh copy of Slashdot to read within a day of making my request.
And leaving comments? Don't get me started!
This is what I remember most about CnD:
http://cmdrtaco.net/hamster/
You're right. I think they should start a new site: "Metadot" or something like that. We can have stories about Slashdot, comments about slashdot, complaints about the moderation system, complaints about trolls, complaints about the newsworthiness of items on slashdot, and about anonymous cowards (etc, etc). Sound better?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I remember stumbling on Chips and Dips when I was looking through the Hope pages wondering what the department was doing. Seemed like a pretty interesting little project, so I've continued lurking and contributing when I could. I've really enjoyed the site, and can't thank Rob enough for all of the years of reading. It's still the site I use for my tech news, despite the Diggs, Reddits, and what-nots.
Thanks again. Rob, for Slashdot back then, and may there be many many more years of Slashdot to come!
I'm glad you wrote this Cmdr. I have loved this site since '00. I don't give a damn what anyone says, Slashdot is still one of the best tech aggregation sites on the net.
I think that's my number. Could have been lower if I had cared to register earlier. Anyhow, yeah, I've been reading on and off for a while. It's changed surprisingly little over the years.
Here's the Wayback archive of Rob Malda's page at Hope College.
From his About Me page: "In closing, I would just like to say that if you read this whole document, then you need more of a life than I need for typing it." Keep in mind that this is the same page that states he got into computers due to "A strong need to somehow construct a woman like those kids in Weird Science".
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I think the discussion has been interesting. It's informative to see how the more important sites on the 'net were started. There's a common theme; geeks doing it for the love and fun of it.
Best regards.
I don't get it, so what if it is 2 years old?
Way back in the first few days, /. was quite wild and fun and about half the posts were trolls, flamebaits, races to see who could get the first post, with a whole lot of personality mixed in. If Jon Katz (To all former Katz haters, I still think we did the site an immense service, especially around the time of the Columbine shootings.) were still here, I think he'd have a lot of very interesting things to say about the good this site has done.
What was wilder still was that not too long after I first joined, the first attempts at moderation came into effect -- and for some reason they decided to let a sort of "down in the dumps at the time techie" who is a pretty good writer -- uh, that would be me -- be one of the few who started the moderation ball rolling. At the time if ya let someone know you were one of the moderators or abused the privilege --> poof no more moderation for you bucko!
Within weeks /. rose out of the dregs to become a site I still participate in from time to time, that I am proud to call part of my daily web experience, and that has shaped quite a few important debates, from the DCMA to SCO and a lot of ground in between. And I got to play in their sandbox and try to make a little difference in the world along the way. [They even tell me I have excellent Karma. :-) ]
I want to point at one more accomplishment over the last few yearsthat really deserves a standing ovation: on 9/11/2001, Slashdot was the only major news feed on the web that didn't crash due to overload, and this on technology and bandwidth that was way way WAY behind what we have now.
So, anonymously from a long time
meta-meta-meta-meta....
When will http://slashdot.org/ come out of the dark ages and grow up to http://www.slashdot.org/ ? http://www.slashdot.org/ has been down for years. Could some of you early ones fill in on the story behind this strangeness?
I don't remember when (or how) I first came upon Slashdot, but it was in the early years. I used it for a long time before registering for an account, simply to rebel against what was then deemed to be an unacceptable invasion of privacy (I was quite paranoid back then). If I had known how horny the hot chicks got over low Slashdot IDs, I would have registered far earlier -sigh-.
Yeah me, too. That's why I made sure I was the original Anonymous Coward at
(In most other places, I'm the original Anonymous and IP Logged).
One way to get rid of them is to tell 'em stories that dont go anywhere. Like the time we went over to shelbyville during the war, I wore an onion on my belt....which was the style at the time...you couldnt get those white ones, you could only get those big yellow ones.................now where was I........oh yeah, the important thing was I was wearing an onion on my nelt, which was the style at the time, you couldnt get those...
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
You are a sparkling conversationalist.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Fellate the man! Don't just do it in text, put your actual lips to work!
You're halfway there already, so you may as well make the attempt.
Scorpion. That's the account I originally signed up with, and I've totally forgotten the login details and probably don't have access to the email address anymore. I try every so often to convince the admins to unlock it for me, but no joy.
Ian
Back then anyone could B a big fish in a small sea by working on Linux programs. Not so anymore.
Kadaffy is still a Colonel, after all.
It was either that you stopped informing us on those details
or
that you haven't purchased more underpants since August 24th, 2000.
Then again, it could be both...
Post it on "slashdot"
...actually, there's already a site like that. It's called "slashdot.org".
Oh, and "In soviet russia, slashdot complains about YOUR stories".
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
.. I yearn for the days when I would get a personal message from Cmrd. Taco and the gang, just for posting something smart to their new website.
..
Ah, those were the days. Before 'blogs' (what a horrid term), before 'wiki' (oh even worse...), before the push and the pull and the stagnation. Before hot grits. When you could check the site every *two days* or so, and not necessarily miss a story.
Oh, slashdot, you are a tempestuous mistress, but how we love you well
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
And yet you still haven't learned the difference between "then" and "than." Sigh.
First of all, mods, that shouldn't be "-1 flamebait". Second, Erich, it's refreshing to see that even people with 3-digit userids get suckered into confrontations with trolling ACs.
I tip my hat to you, sir!
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
In the future, slashdot will have a flying car!
In the future, slashdot will achieve sentience! AI researches predict this is less than 5 years away!
In the future, androids will do all the work for the editors!
As miniaturization continues, in the future slashdot will move to 8 pt. type!
In a year and a half, slashdot will have twice as many transistors as it does now!
In the future, slashdot will be ready for the desktop!
etc... I'm sure you can come up with your own...
-- "Oh. This guy again."
There are, obviously, thousands of people who registered in the four-digit era. They were certainly on the leading edge then -- why do we only see a few of them around these days?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Back when I first came here one could read every comment from every story posted and still have spare time.
it's been pretty cool watching /. grow into the monster-that-it-is-today over the years. might have to check out the local party.
I tried to be UID 32k (32,768) but missed by 179. Nah, j/k. It was sometime late '98 or early '99.
At least I beat Wil Wheaton though. Nyah nyah!
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
(Score:1)
by wiredog (43288) on 03:52 PM May 26th, 1999
And I probably posted that comment within a day or two of registering.
Best Slashdot Co
Are there any posters to print out? If there are SVG's of the logo and other graphics we can make local variations.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
When I first started checking /. out I felt a little out of place and it took a little time for me to register and post. But I'm glad I did. There's a ton of information floating around here and most of the members are helpful.
Congrats on 10 years of service.
...just hoping that someday 1166671 will be a low id.
That's where I saw the "ads" for Chips 'n Dips.
I seem to remember several other people telling you to knock it off, too. They're gone, you're here.
I've enjoyed reading this site for years since around 1998 or 1999. It helped me become the geek I am today. Somehow I didn't manage to get a CS degree, but it's helped me keep in touch with the tech sector, learn about PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc. Even though I may not have the diploma, I can manage to run a server and host a number of different webistes.
For the most part, I'm an Anonymous Coward and rarely contribute to the discussions, but I appreciate Slashdot nonetheless.
Thanks for the many years and I hope to keep reading for many more.
That's all very nice, but where do the polls come from, and who decides the CowboyNeal "funny" choice is actually funny?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
One of the first sites I made about 5 years ago used a colour scheme based on #7ab and somehow it stuck. ...I wish I'd picked an easier to remember hex code now :(
Why do you want horny birds? That's sick. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
WOw, I thought I got in on the game late! Probably early 98. I think most of the owners of numbers below 10000 have already grown old and died.
"Posessing a degree in science does not necessarily make one a scientist"
With all due respect to /. - Fark also stayed up on the morning of 9/11.
I believe I registered in late 1998 or early 1999. I remember liking that my account number was the same as the year (or close enough)and therefore easy to remember...
I was looking for security related sites and forums and came upon Slashdot after a while. After reading a few articles and admiring the place I was hooked.
The years flew past and I got caught up in one of the infamous mass-bannings from a while back. I'm pretty sure that it's all in the past but I still can't get any mod points in this account, which is a shame.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I can't be the only sub-5-digit Slashdotter who still works in the same building, same floor (different office number) that I was ten years ago when I registered.
I swear, I'll finish my thesis one of these days (grin)!
Ah them were the days...
Don't let my "high" ID fool you, I was also one of those who lurked on slashdot since the early days. I remember when the user accounts were started. Earlier in this discussion someone asked to gauge how long it took to hit certain milestones in slashdot uid #'s. I would say it was between 2 and 3 years before we hit 200k, based on how long I seem to remember reading slashdot before thinking to myself, "well, dammit, I really ought to get to making a user id, before these numbers get too big". Yeah, it took me that long to decide to create an account. This is like my 3rd slashdot comment in 10 years. I am a lurker extra-ordinaire.
anyway, that's a side point to my main question:
who here remembers the little text box form Taco had on CnD, that let you send a message to his console?
Taco, I wrote you maybe a dozen times or so, usually like 4 or 5 messages all at once within about the same number of minutes... I can't remember a single thing that I wrote to you through that little one line form, but I hope you got a laugh out of it. oh, and Hamster Havoc still rocks.
--Josh
We grew up. :) Few of us have the time that we did then. We're married, we have kids, mortgages, etc.
This site should be called /./.
Is that really the way Anonymous Coward started? If so, my memory is failing.
I remember that there was a user that called himself Anonymous Coward in the days before user accounts. I thought that he wrote some pretty decent, though sometimes trollish, posts. Then there were all kinds of problems with people impersonating other users (especially Bruce Perens). So user accounts were created. When the accounts were created, the name "Anonymous Coward" was appropriated from people who weren't logged in. Some claimed that this ticked off the original AC, though no one could tell for sure.
Anyway, if anyone else remembers any of that, please back me up.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
I want to see this guy modded troll for once :D
I worked a helpdesk at CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) at UNSW (Uni of NSW - that's in Oz folks) in the days of Rasterman.
Had several students ask me the URL for slashdot.org. My theory was - if they had to ask, they don't need it.
ahhh - those were the days.
that I started reading /. around 2000. I was working at a web startup then and it was about the only thing that kept me sane. That does sound like a strange thing to say....
SlashDot is only 10 years old? I thought it was older than that; that's only 11000 months...
I first encountered Slashdot in 2000 when I started a new job. We did, among other things, two-way paging systems, and had a setup that forwarded various things to our pagers. This included new headlines, weather forecasts, and something new and mysterious (to me) called Slashdot.
In 1997 I had not yet heard of Slashdot, but was a regular customer of a new upstart Internet business called amazon.com. I first started playing with the Internet in 1987, when I considered myself fortunate indeed to have a 9600 baud SLIP line so I could access email, newsgroups and ftp sites.
...laura
. . . figure out why people were doing that rather than using killall in their xterms--but then, my giving up lynx as my primary browser is a fairly recent event (I'm told that the bug that forced the change has been fixed).
hawk
For me whats incredible to be able to read slashdot in my mobile phone. I added /. on RSS feeds in Opera for mobile.. Now I can read /. in the subway, in the bus, at every street.. cool!. After many year reading /., beeing able to read it everywhere was incredible.
Why don't the user pages have join dates? After reading through a large portion of this thread (during class, my apologies to all, CmdrTaco gets it) I realized that most of us don't realize how long we've been reading this site, much less how long we've been _officially_ contributing.
Just thought I would tag your comment and hope for a reply shortly.
2^3 * 31 * 647
That was a sad day to find out RM was being consumed by Yahoo!
Had Y! even kept the interface, probably I would have been ecstatic. Instead, I had to wander aimlessly from HoTMaiL to Y! accts till that glorious day when I got my shiny new GMail acct.
2^3 * 31 * 647
Thanks for that, always nice to read a story from the annals of internet history. The web's just not like it used to be...
Hell, I was just getting into the Internet and it's series of tubes back in 1997. Can't say I was ever around for the old school BBS days but I was certainly around for the days of dial up and Netscape being the browser of choice compared to IE.
/. is still going. Been reading it a few years now. Best site for geek related news in my opinion. It's not bloated or anything compared to other sites and it hosts stories on damn near everything geek related, video games, science fiction tv shows & movies, computer stuff etc It's like the best summarization of the internet in one site. An aesthetically pleasing layout, not a ton of intrusive ad's or flash banners, simple and to the point. Really enjoy it ;) Here's to hoping we get another 10 great years.
Glad to see
Aw Frell this
Ah yes, RFC1149. What a glorious upgrade from the rock network. Basically, in the old days, you would chisel your message onto a stone, preferably a small one, then lob it at your neighbor, and he would read the address, then throw it in the direction he thought it was supposed to go, and so on until it infrequently arrived at its intended destination. There's an ugly rumor that some 80% of the lost packets can be found at the bottom of Lake Wobegon as the result of a malicious MITM attack.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
i registered, have a login, but its for an email address at my very first job.
i dont remember my first password scheme - how do i get my low low uid back? I can recite the email, but it bounces (company was on dial up, mail through uucp then, I moved the server from AIX to slack)...
I'm another one of these people that have been reading Slashdot for quite some time without registering an account here. I've been reading the site since about 1999 or so.
After someone recommended unticking him as a poster in the options his stories never bored me again.
I completely forgot about him and that his posts would annoy me - Sure i didn't have to read them, and once that box was unticked i never did again.
The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing.
Backfired another way, too.
I was told about Slashdot by Hugh Daniels (verbally) during a busy time, when I had GAFIAted from conferencing systems but might have picked up participating again for a good one. Thanks to the confusing and unpronouncable name I didn't end up getting around to joining it for some time (couple years?) after. (Thus my five-digit user number.)
Now perhaps there are some (like my "freaks") who don't think that was a backfire. B-) But I suspect there are a lot of others, many valuable, who didn't find and start participating until much later than if the site had been named differently.
Or who never participated at all. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
over 1 million user accounts now kinda blows my mind. that's awesome. I spent many a day.. and afternoon.. and night... clicking /. waiting for new stories, hoping there'd be something new to look at and maybe comment. I have a fairly high UID for back then, but knowing that there's 985,000+ people who signed up after me is kinda awe-inspiring. Congratulations on 10 years, slashdot and CmdrTaco.
What's also amazing is that the level of trolling here seems like nothing compared to the likes of Digg and friends nowadays. A real conversation is actually almost kind of possible, so far as a bunch of still socially-backwards computer dorks are able to manage not to piss each other off too badly.
Chips and Dips from the wayback
machine.
Early slashdot pages.
From your old pal UID=2991. It's been a trip. Especially that whole Columbine article. That's when I knew /. had more social capital than was probably advisable.
Congratulations!
Wow, the years have flown by. In the 10 years since I started reading this site, I've had:
-4 Jobs
-2 Kids
-1 Wife
And yet slashdot has been part of my life all that time, as I still visit several times a week. For me, the lowest point was the W. Richard Stevens debacle, and the high point was the release of the Netscape source code.
Thanks for giving me such a great reason to avoid work!
..or even MIT.edu! That'd be crazy.
Taco, I just want to wish you all the best in the next 10 years. I've enjoyed Slashdot ever since I was introduced to it in 2002. I've even had a few articles published to your main page, and got a few first posts in my glory days ;-)
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Try using Ask Slashdot on an abacus. And I didn't realize how many friggin digits the UID is up to these days.. I actually feel vaguely honored that I only have a five digit one, some of these suckers look like they got in after the first few quatloos had already registered.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
I actually found out about the planes from the chat applet on slashdot's languishing sister site, Everything2. Remember when Slashdot used to put superscript on some words in articles, and point to definitions over there?
Oh, and speaking of losing mod ability, my original account, artifex (uid 18308) seemingly was blocked from moderating, though I could still metamod. So I started this one. They know, but don't care, sort of proving the arbitrariness. I wasn't one of the 400, I was one of the ones in the scandal where some editor just started doing that to people who complained about others being blocked, or something.
I started reading Slashdot early in 1998. I finally joined because I wanted to improve the layout: filter the homepage and show threads properly. I used my first name for a UID in the 79000s. I deliberately used my company email address so the registration would not haunt my permanent email accounts. Nobody cared about UIDs. I was not posting so I did not care about karma.
I left that company in 2000. Returned to Slashdot the next year having forgotten my password. Waited a couple of months trying to remember before registering my current account. Slashdot posters had changed from mostly professionals to mostly college students, but moderation kept it readable.
Would others correct/complete the timeline of UIDs?
1998-01 1
1998-03 23,000
2001 600,000
2002 800,000
2005 980,000
2007 1,100,000
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Believe it or not, I found slashdot because of Seti@Home....
There were several of us at IBM who were running Seti@Home on our brand-new super powerful PII-450s - one of the guys emailed us the UserFriendly cartoon of Arthur formulating a plan to rescue Stef from Microsoft, but loosing a few cycles along the way. I ended up reading the entire UF archive. When I finished that I looked for something else to read and discovered this little teal button labeled "Slashdot"...
That was eight years ago and I've never been the same...
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Not really, although there are more and more days when it feels that way :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"Slashdot" is a sort of obnoxious parody of a URL. When I originally registered the domain, I wanted to make the URL silly, and unpronounceable. With this being a news site, I always kind of imagined the name of the site was a reference to the current directory -
- although thinking about it that would be
...who reads FAQs anyway...
Hey Rob, hard to believe it's been 10 years. I remember you pimping your new website on #linuxos in EFnet IRC 10 years ago. If only I had listened to you when you said that it was gonna be HUGE, and registered an account a little earlier. Then I could have had a two digit slashdot ID instead of my pathetic four digit one... and then the women would find me irresistible. If only... sigh.
-Bugoid, a.k.a., Dave
woot. This is crazy. I didn't think anyone important went to Hope. I am currently a student (class of '09) and its awesome to hear that someone from Hope made it big (at least in my eyes). I read pretty much every story that passes through /., and i've been doing it for a year or two. Crazy to think it was at one time hosted on smaug (probably). now im curious. You know all about my world, VanZoren and Voorhees and the Kletz and all that goodness.
I remember a few things about the early days... before moderation, First Post!, back when we were an insular crowd. I got interested in Linux about the same time I found Slashdot. I was on Usenet as a Linux advocate dispelling fud and such from the MS marketdroids and fanboys.
Someone on cola told me about Slashdot. It was Usenet on roids and way easier on the eyes. And yes, many of the fanboys would come to Slash and spew their FUD but hey, this was OUR forum where they were the outsiders. It's amazing how many of them still use the same playbook same arguments...
I saw Linux go from: What the heck is that... an air conditioner? To: Oh yeah, isn't that some kind of application? To: We are implementing this new OS called Linux for our mission critical infrastructure.
I remember hearing folks around the office constantly complaining about how they couldn't find anything on the internet... I told them about Google.
I remember the vibrant tech sector where new and fantastic things were being announced on a daily basis. I remember Linux going from having almost no support whatsoever to having just about every powerful relational database backend support it. Got to watch the whole thing unfold - heady stuff.
That Slashdot is still here and so am I. I will be here as long as the great stories, great posts and insights, and witty comments are to be had.
Hats off to you Rob,
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Man, I was dead before you were even born!
I originally found Slashdot through a screenshot on the Enlightenment site that showed the front page for Chips & Dips... took a while to track down that it had recently moved to slashdot.org. I recall when they added uids (and kick myself every once in a while now for not registering sooner), but didn't see much point until some preferences were added, tied to the uid (I think it was that it would remember your score cutoff for browsing, if you browsed while logged in).
They used to post some pretty weird stories occasionally, back then. Anyone remember the lengthy writeup about how JWZ had died? Complete with fond rememberances from RMS and others? And then Taco saying, "No, no, it was a joke, see. Wasn't it funny?"
Unless I get hit by a car, I will outlast you on /. !!!
I really wanted 1024, but I couldn't time it just right...
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Man, y'all are making me feel old. I remember flying out to Michigan in 2000 for a story about Slashdot back when I worked at the Washington Post. We ate, we talked, I wrote, it was fun....
"speaking only for myself since 1957"
just thought i'd check in with the 4-digit uid club. kudos to the decade!
I remember being seriously pissed that /. wanted me to register a userID for the site. I don't remember what it was that made me do it, but it took me a while to just bite the bullet and register. I coulda been a 2-digit!
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I first found the site in 1998 when a work colleague (and Linux-head) pointed me to it. I liked the site well enough to sign up, but was discouraged when I realized that the site already had over 1000 users! I created an account anyway, even though I was sure the fun times were already over since the site was so large.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
*ding!*
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.