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.
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!
Back in the day, I was TERRIFIED that I wouldn't get my name in a site registry, or a webmail system. The Internet was small enough you could register almost everywhere "important".
:-)
I'm 167 on Technocrat.net. Same disease.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Dude, I *invented* it. You guys told me it couldn't be done. Of course, you were right- the performance sucked, but it looked awesome.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Well, Enlightenment DR16 is very stable and mature now (as it better be), and .17 should be out of pre-alpha by the time Duke Nukem Forever runs on Linux.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
I don't get it, so what if it is 2 years old?
Wait, so you read slashdot for the stories!?
Man things really have changed.
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).
In those days, xkill was in my dock!
Remember Netscape 4.x? xkill was in EVERYBODY'S dock, and it got used daily.
0 1 - just my two bits
Hourly... ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It just occurred to me that 10 years in grade is long enough. Shouldn't you be CaptTaco by now? ;-)
Well, I found an old e-mail sent to me from slashdot back in 2000... I have no idea when my account was actually created though.
Received: from mail.andover.net [64.28.67.55] (slashdot@slashdot.org); Thu, 13 Jul 2000 14:01:19 -0400
X-Envelope-To: bweaver
Received: from localhost (nobody@www4.slashdot.com [10.2.48.4])
by mail.andover.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) with SMTP id e6DI1UA08134
for <bweaver@mailandnews.com>; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 14:01:30 -0400
Message-Id: <200007131801.e6DI1UA08134@mail.andover.net>
Subject: Slashdot user password for Brian360
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Mime-version: 1.0
To: bweaver@mailandnews.com
From: slashdot@slashdot.org
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 18:01 +0000
X-PMFLAGS: 34078848 0 1 P2DD70.CNM
The user account 'Brian360' on Slashdot has this email
associated with it. A web user from 208.3.12.32 has
just requested that password be sent. It is 'YHr7MgVF'. You
can change it after you login at <URL:http://slashdot.org/users.pl>.
If you didn't ask for this, don't get your panties all in a knot.
You are seeing this message, not "them". So if you can't be
trusted with your own password, we might have an issue, otherwise,
you can just disregard this message.
--Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
malda@slashdot.org
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...
The key is to reload early and often. I hope you've learned a valuable lesson.
it did in fact look awesome :)
We always tried to come up with ways to make the performance run a little better. And you have to admit I did spend a lot of time cleaning it up where it didn't crash anymore ;)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
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."
Well over a thousand I should think.
So basically what you're saying is that even though it causes confusion and problems for your users and advertisers, you'll never change it because technically it is superfluous. If this isn't the heart and soul of a *nix user distilled into one post I'm not sure what is.
So to have 'http' and 'www' in the same URL is redundant and needless.
ah, I think I understand and comprehend.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
I did, I've been clicking refresh every five minutes for ten years.
...just hoping that someday 1166671 will be a low id.
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)!
I want to see this guy modded troll for once :D
/. was already pretty damned close to what it is today, visually at least.I don't know, about half those stories look like they were duped last week :P
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I think so too. By rights, all 300K of us should have 3-digit UIDs.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
But to change his name, he'd need access to the database.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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
Uh, do you remember the passwords for those accounts and would you be willing to share :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm only kinda exagerating ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
You also never see Wil Wheaton and Batman in the same photograph, either.
Or Batman and Hitler, for that matter.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased