Whether it was a catch phrase, or a video, or a song, or whatever. . .
Maybe you’re an old timer, and it is an oft repeated joke from the days of compuserve?
Or maybe you’re 13, and “all your base is belong to us” is the first thing you remember.
Anyway, I remember getting the “dancing baby” that I think was spawned by the Ally McBeal show from several people, eventually including variations.
I think 13-year-olds are too young to remember/know about All Your Base. That’s the first internet meme I was really “into,” and it happened around my senior year of high school. Over five years ago.
The earliest fad that I recall is from the 300-baud BBS days of the late 1970s through early 1980s: ASCII Art. I remember how tickled I was when I printed out a text file on my dot-matrix printer, and it turned out to be a huge picture of Snoopy.
Wow, I was easily amused back then.
Not a fad, but I remember the Good Times virus hoax.
I guess it would be ASCII Art, and emoticons in general.
If we can go before the Internet, it would be that stupid duck smashing the keyboard video EXE file that preceded AGIFs. “Hit any key” - yuck yuck.
One of the oldest ones I remember clearly is that Mark Paul Gossler is dead.
I can remember when smilies were just starting to catch on. And we didn’t have cute little pictures to click on either…we had to type the : and the ) all by ourselves!
My favorite was Marge Simpson: @@@@
I remember those. And “All your bases” was what I was coming in here to post. (I’m 23 for the record.)
Prolly the Hamster Dance and then variations.
Though it was a fad in my sixth grade “enrichment” class to make the Tandy do a loop in Basic that said “[You] + [potentially desirable object of affection] = True Love Forever!”
Probably All Your Base or Real Ultimate Power.
I’m 25 and have been online since late '99, I think.
The first one I remember was the “Bill Gates and Michael Eisner will give you $500 if you forward this e-mail to ten people” chain letter. I think I got those as soon as I opened my first e-mail account, which was probably a free Juno box in 1995 or 1996. I remember being totally techno-wowed by the term “e-mail beta tracking system.” :rolleyes: <-- at me.
Here’s where I reveal my age: I remember the game of life.
alt.folklore.urban
Emoticons are surprisingly old. I used to use irc on the old Cleveland freenet back in like 1994 and I remember being confused as to why people typed colon-right paranthesis until someone explained it to me.
1994 makes me ancient in internet terms. I remember reading something in IIRC 1998 or 1999 that said if you’ve been using the internet for 5 years then you were part of the first half-percent of internet users… so by now it has to be… quite a small fraction.
Wow, I never thought of '94 as ancient in internet terms, but I guess in the scheme of things it is. I remember when Yahoo! was just a collection of Jerry’s favorite links accessible, um, was it through gopher? No web browsers, just telnet, ftp, gopher, lynx (which I guess is technically a web browser), pine, elm, etc…
The first fad I remember (although I’m not sure if you can call it a fad), which technically falls under the Internet and not private BBSes, would be all those virus hoax emails in the early 90s.
Flash back to 1974 or 1975. Quoting was just introduced in PLATO Pad (a Notesfile, and maybe the first message board in the world.) Quoting was done embedded in the message. People found it fascinating posting “Don’t you get the feeling of deja vu reading Pad” - and the next person quoted it, and the next person, and the next person, and so on for the 63 post limit.
The next one came when someone posted “It was a dark and stormy night” and the computerized multi-author continued story was born. (Non-computerized ones predate this.) Enough people did this that it broke the notesfile.
The third was kind of FSM or IPUish. In a religious notesfile, a sysadmin named Biggs (username biggs of s) said “I’m god.” Lots of people agreed, and the cult of sbiggsism was formed, with lessons written giving a Biggsian bible, some original, some copied.
The first one I remember as being the thing everyone had to go out and get was After Dark screensaver software sometime in the early 90’s.
Me, too.
Mr. T Ate My Balls and its countless spinoffs.
I’m still waiting for my check from Bill Gates.