First: don’t remember. There have been too many of them.
Worst: alt.music.saxophone, which went form a lively and useful group to a gutted playhouse-from-hell in less than a year, thanks to 2 rival sax mouthpiece makers and a sax dealer/repairman who basically used it as their personal pissing arena.
This flamewar went on for literally years, and still surfaces now and then. Musicians… :rolleyes:
Hey, Doug, was one of them named ansermetniac? Otherwise known as Jeffrey?
When I was a young and naive college sophmore (1992) just sticking his toe into the vast ocean of Usenet for the first time, I inadvertently touched off a flamewar in alt.history that raged for months on end without me contributing a thing beyond the initial two-line question. I’d heard from someone that the Serbs had collaborated with the Nazis in WWII and wanted to know if this was true. When I saw the spewing vitriol that resulted I just stared in Urkular wonder: “did I do that?”
BING! An absolute central-casting net.kook – except that he’s a frustrated musician instead of a frustrated scientist.
He has invaded several alt.binaries groups and is inflicting his, well, I guess you can’t talk about it here. Let’s just say that after an initial few months of flaming, in which he proved what an idiot he is, he’s in everybody’s killfile.
Your buddy was having you on, (or he worked in a shop where their particular standards prohibited the use of the COMPUTE verb–there are some odd managers out in the world). I started with COBOL-68 in 1979 and I have only used the “ADD x TO y GIVING z” construction a couple of times in my life for specific documentation purposes. In fact, I once wrote up a list of the math syntaxes that did not use COMPUTE because we had new kid coders coming into the shop who were running into older syntax that they did not understand. The COMPUTE verb was available before COBOL-68 (although it might not have handles powers prior to COBOL-68). (The -68, -74, -85 suffixes indicate the years that ANSI released agreed upon syntaxes, so we’re talking a verb that was available at least 21 years before you first saw the language.)
Go ahead and stand by your slur; it will make it easier to recognize you in the crowd. 
Not my first flamewar, I forgot what the very first one was about, or even where it was.
The most entertaining flamewar that I’ve seen, however, is the ongoing saga of Derek Smart Against The World™. I think that Derek Smart has managed to flame his way onto the banned list of nearly all the computer gaming forums that there are in existence. I always enjoy seeing a discussion regarding games that will suddenly get derailed because someone’s mentioned the word “BattleCruiser” in anything less than awed and hushed tones, and La Smart has popped out of the woodwork to tell the forumgoers that they’re idiots, retarded, running sub-par PCs, or all three.
Rec.martial-arts.
Man, what a trollhole. Just crammed to the gills with martial arts posers who would start flamewars about whether Karate was better than Taekwondo or Bruce Lee was better than Chuck Norris or whether monkeys would fly out of your butt if you did jujitsu or whatever.
I go back and read it about once a year now. It’s like a soap opera - the characters might occasionally change but the plot never does.