The one thread that comes to mind is Wally and the gerbil. I laughed so hard my sides ached.
Well I’m with you! After all, if we do not all hang together, we shall all hang seperately.
Pssst! Is there any way for a fella to find out what his user ID# is?
It’s #1723.
I’ve also, for the past five years, been mostly a reader of the boards and not much of a poster. Looking at the list of '99ers here so far, I’m definitely at the bottom of the post-count list.
I hereby resolve to lurk less and post more!
Another old timer checking in. Remember being on the board at the Y2K switch over wondering if the world as we knew it was going to collapse.
Nope.
I remember when Enderw24 was a punk college kid with no thought of law school. Surely he’s a lawyer by now? I remember when Doctor Jackson was a medical student. I remember Pepperlandgirl as a junior in high school, and then planning her wedding and having to defend getting married so young. Now she must be close to graduating from college, yes?
What’s strange to me is that the longer I am here the more I lurk. Part of it is time–In the last five years I’ve moved from college student to AP English teacher, and I don’t have the time I used to have to compose long posts. But also my personality has changed: I’m a lot more content to read what others have to say and keep my own council.
#36 here.
I don’t really remember when I started posting on the AOL board, but I know that Dominic was still a baby and I still lived in Arizona. I also don’t remember when I started the Teeming Millions Homepage, but I know that the “last modified” timestamp on some of the original graphics is from 1997.
Some people I miss: VegForLife… CHolomshek… did Bermuda999 make it over here under a different name that I never caught on to?
I remember when I made the “Teeming Millions Other Message Board” on fathom for people to post stuff that was against AOL’s TOS so they couldn’t say it on the official board. (I later combined that board with a general fathom.org board, which had both been running on WebBBS software and upgraded to UBB software and renamed the boards the Fabulous Forums of Fathom… in case you were wondering where that came from.)
I remember the origins of “MPSIMS” (Was it DMG550 (sp??) who started that thread?) and the Ruda Duda thread. I remember LilHippo, Chevy, and the other moronic folk who used to post just to be annoying idiots… ahhhh the forefathers of our modern trolls…
I remember the Halloween Masquerade chats back when there were official, hosted SDMB chat nights. I remember when Jon Cryer came to chat and had some contest thing where he gave away the bracelet he wore in Sixteen Candles…(Didn’t Stephmon win that?)
I’m a '99er, though just barely.
Shouldn’t we at least get a T-Shirt?
I think that any of us who have been here since '99 should get special recognition. A sanctioned clique, if you will.
Gosh, 5 years…say it ain’t so, Joe!
If I haven’t said it before, it bears saying here: what a rollicking, goofy, interesting, educational, scary, and hilarious group you folks are. Thank you for the good times, man (sniff).
I thought that the first thread I started was about French Toast Toppings. I still maintain that F.T. is better prepared as a savoury, not sweet, dish!
But, incredibly I find that my oldest thread was one involving songs about self-abuse…ah, youth!
When I first started posting, I read the whole board before I posted (it was fairly easy to do this on AOL) and there had apparently been a lot of recent threads where people were asking if it was possible to light your farts. Also, why do cats stick their butts in the air when you pet them, but mainly lighting farts had been so common that people where whining about it. So my very first thread was asking if it was possible to light armpit farts. HAR HAR HAR. Yeah, whatever.
Eutychus(55) is gonna yell at me for this, but how could we forget bjørn?!
I’d read the message boards once or twice when they were on AOL at my sister’s house, but I wasn’t into the whole message board thing at the time, and I didn’t have AOL at home anyway.
When the boards (and the entire Straight Dope site) moved away from AOL, I spent manny, manny hours reading up the archives, most of which I’d read in the books anyway.
Once I finished doing that and was bored one night, I made my way to the message boards, read a little, signed up a few days later, and was hooked from there.
I spent a lot of time here, met my darling husband and many wonderful friends here, and drifted to and fro over the last 4 years or so. I’m just starting to read more, and perhaps I’ll participate more; it really is a great site and a great community.
As if that grey hair I found this mroning wasn’t making me feel quite old enough. 
Is bjørn really that old? Dang… that seems so recent. Time speeds up as you get older, doesn’t it…
I don’t know if he was strictly that old, but god knows we’ve all gotten a good dose of him. I think he’s the first person I (probably lamely) flamed, and that’s a pretty low total, anyway. I wonder if he’ll subscribe.
I’m a 99er, although I still feel like a n00b. I’m one of those red-headed step children of the SDMB who hadn’t read the books before joining. A real doper, my best friend, who has since passed away, invited me to come check out the boards and forced me to read all the archives, bless his soul.
I started out strong my first few years but then as the boards became increasingly hard to access I drifted away quite a bit. Now that they are running better I hope to jump back in where I left off.
I loved the Earth is Flat thread, had/have a crush on TVeblen (is she still around?), hated Diane (we’re friends now ;)) and, as psycat mentioned above, we met here and just got married last year. I can’t count the number of incredible friends I’ve met here. Thanks Unca Cecil!
What ever happened to NeuroTrshGrl(sp?)? Man, she could tear shit up in the Pit!
To clarify, Demo met and married psycat90, not Diane.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
My chief memory is completely personal – I changed jobs in June of 1999. For a year, I didn’t post to the boards, because I’d forgotten my password. (Back then, you couldn’t change your password; you had to use the freaky one the SDMB sent you.) I checked the site almost every day, reading threads and getting frustrated because I wanted to respond, but wasn’t able to do so.
One day, it dawned on me that the “Forgot password?” link would probably be helpful. (Why, yes, I was born in raised in Alabama. Why do you ask?)
Once I got my password back, I had to fight the temptation to resurrect year-old threads and post to them.
I’m still alive, but I don’t really post here anymore. That’s not saying I have one of those “life” things, however. It’s called Livejournal. :^)
I don’t even remember when I started out on his board. I remember the AOL board and how I was only 14-15 at the time. People freaked out on me because I kept writing annoying lovey-dovey posts with JPetraliaX.
I read old posts I wrote on here and it’s so embarrassing!
Much love.