The History of the World According to Slashdot
By Yu Suzuki
- 2.5 million BC
- OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators’ heads.
- 100,000 BC
- Man domesticates the AIBO.
- 10,000 BC
- Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
- 3000 BC
- Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform Perl script.
- 2920 BC
- A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland/Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
- 1750 BC
- Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
- 490 BC
- Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks “get it.”
- 399 BC
- Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
- 336 BC
- Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
- 4 BC
- Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethlehem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
- AD 476
- The Roman Empire BSODs.
- AD 610
- The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
- AD 800
- Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by Andover.net.
- AD 874
- Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
- AD 1000
- The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
- AD 1095
- Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
- AD 1215
- Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy’s power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy “gets it.”
- AD 1348
- The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
- AD 1420
- Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the Church’s intellectual property.
- AD 1429
- Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
- AD 1478
- The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
- AD 1492
- Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be “India,” but which RMS informs him is actually “GNU/India.”
- AD 1508–12
- Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the “Lameness Filter.”
- AD 1517
- Martin Luther nails his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to “−1, Flamebait.”
- AD 1553
- “Bloody” Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
- AD 1588
- The “IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS” guy meets the Spanish Armada.
- AD 1603
- Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
- AD 1611
- Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
- AD 1688
- In the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy “gets it.”
- AD 1692
- Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous “Salem GIF Trials,” in which twenty alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
- AD 1769
- James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
- AD 1776
- Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco’s passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
- AD 1789
- The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
- AD 1799
- Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon’s troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
- AD 1844
- Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph’s use outside the US and Canada.
- AD 1853
- United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally “gets it.”
- AD 1865
- President Lincoln is “bitchslapped.” The nation mourns.
- AD 1901
- Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
- AD 1911
- Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its “freedom to innovate” and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as “Standa~1” and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
- AD 1929
- V.A. Linux’s stock drops over 200 dollars on “Black Tuesday,” October 29th.
- AD 1945
- In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
- AD 1948
- Slashdot runs the infamous headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
- AD 1965
- Jon Katz delivers his famous “I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream” speech, which stated: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks… I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek.”
- AD 1969
- Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: “First moonwalk!!!”
- AD 1970
- Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for “Internet theft.”
- AD 1989
- The United States invades Panama to capture renowned “hacker” Manuel Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
- AD 1990
- West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany “gets it.”
- AD 1994
- As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa “gets it.”
- AD 1997
- Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net.
- AD 1999
- Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie Takedown.
This was originally posted to Slashdot by Yu Suzuki on 2000-05-23T21:27Z under the subject “History of the World”.