this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Antique Memes Roadshow
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'Going Viral' wasn't a term yet and 'Meme' didn't yet mean what it does today, but as someone who was a nerdy teen in the geocities era, this is the first thing I remember that started on the internet and reached a truly mass audience.
Can anyone think of any earlier example of an internet meme going viral?
Hamster dance.
Hampsterdance is from -98, dancing baby is -96.
Back when meme transmission was "hey, did you get that e-mail? I'll forward it to you the next time I log on"
Back when your grandma would print out an email chain letter and bring it to your house.
When I got this back in the day the subject line was something like:
Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Fw: ad infinitum
This was from a time when people would send actual video files to random people over email and they would open it with no concern about viruses.
This feels a bit anachronistic. Email attachment size limitations were strict in the 90s, bandwidth was limited, and video codecs sucked. I don’t have strong memories of people forwarding realplayer videos. I don’t consider gifs and flash to be video, maybe that’s it?
Doesn’t matter what format the file was in, people did not question opening attachments back then. And computers did very little to protect against malicious emails.
Those were the golden days of infecting people with Sub7. No antivirus, no firewalls. I’d get someone on AOL instant messenger by social engineering them to try out my “screensaver”, then pull their AIM login and buddy list, hit up someone from their buddy list, rinse and repeat.
Imminent Death of the Net emails used to be a thing.
Badger Badger was 2003, and it was the first thing I saw escape the confines of internet nerd-dom and go viral in office spaces. Dancing Baby was mid-90's, so several years earlier, but I never saw it referenced out of the community of the terminally online. Heck, the web was still in it's infancy in the mid-90's.
It was on Ally McBeal and then in other mainstream media for years. It was the origin of the term “viral video”.
Dancing baby made the news and I think it was even in a movie or two.
The trumpeting skull was later?
Created in '99, went viral in 2011.