I got bored today. I’m supposed to be working on a PowerPoint slideshow, but after talking to the girlfriend, I decided to Dope for five minutes instead. Whilst surfing, I changed the address line to show:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=1
“t=1” didn’t work. So I tried “t=2” and got something from '99.
Is there anything earlier? Heck, is there even a UseNet alt.fan.cecil.adams thing anymore?
Tripler
Talk about Internet antiquity!
Wow, it’s like Internet archeology! Who knows what other historic gems the Tubes hold??
Hmm, link doesn’t work for me.
Oops. Ignore what I just said (and deleted, so it would be hard for you not to ignore it).
Only fitting that the OP in that one was Charter Member whitetho. His contributions are among the best researched on the board.
Yep, that was it!
I won’t swear that there wasn’t a welcome message from TubaDiva, but that was definitely the first real thread. Took Cece a long time to get around to answering it, too. (Have you ever tried removing a wevil infestation from one of these?)
Geez, suddenly I feel like some old guy talking about the first time there was an automobile in town!
BTW, alt.fan.cecil-adams is alive and well, though I don’t know much about it. Does anyone post in both places?
I used to frequently read, but infrequently post on the old AOL board. Because I’ll bookmark almost anything, I had bookmarked the thread on wallpaper from the movie Titanic that was the genesis of Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share. Then my last laptop died suddenly, and that was the end of the link.
Oh yeah, and I’ll confess that I’m putting off working as well. Sigh.
That link doesn’t work for me. Is there anyone else for whom the link is actually working?
I thought old threads got killed off in the great accidental purge… 
It wouldn’t work, which was pointed out by the OP.
The second link works.
It’s not actually certain that that’s the oldest thread, though. Way back in the Elder Days, we used to use UBB instead of vB. The switchover kept all of the threads, but it didn’t necessarily keep them all in the same order (in fact, it couldn’t have, since UBB numbered each forum separately). So that’s one of the oldest, but it would be very difficult to tell if it’s actually the oldest.
That’s one day prior to the oldest thread listed by Aesiron, here.