What are some of the oldest internet memes?

meow

There were a lot of Dan Quayle jokes flying around the web in the old days

Omg dan m

:D

The earliest ones from abanana's link that I remember following on any regular basis were Dysfunctional Family Circus (which I used to read at work and lament not having a door that closed so I could laugh) and JenniCam. Prior to widespread internet adoption, I remember a few memes particular to some Usenet groups -- at least two used to refer to people from the UK as "UKOGBANIans." (United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland.)

oh man, DFC was good times (had some captions accepted later in its lifespan)

I recently opened up a box from a closet in our house and found a bunch of DFCs I had printed out to show my wife, because at the time I couldn't email her links from work. LOL 90s.

DFC was as good as it got. I didn't even know you could see it on the Internet. In my memory, you gave your address to a guy on Usenet and then you got a Xeroxed pamphlet in the mail.

Oh yeah -- per Wikipedia, the whole Internet version of DFC postdates the original one. The pamphlet I had, "Her! Us! Motel! Tonight!" was apparently #12.

From what I've understood, in the pre-internet days people used to spread memes using office fax machines... You know, stuff like YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS accompanied by an appropriate pic, various urban legends, jokes, etc. I'm not not old enough to remember this, but I've read about it, maybe some of the older ILXors have recollections of fax memes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxlore

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2033/2071663863_398d3bf2eb_b.jpg

Some early net/computer ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_celebrity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

was just thinking "ed is the standard text editor"

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

On nerdy usenet groups — I believe there was one or two to be found — you'd often see "just another perl hacker" signatures, which usually was some really abstruse bit of code that printed out that phrase if you executed it.

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=412464 says the first (obfuscated) one was in 1990.

I think Mahir was one of the first ones I really remember hearing people in the computer lab talk about, and me and my stoner friends thought the one-hitter signed by Oliver North was hilarious. I also remember the Stinky Meat project being a popular diversion, and someone at my first job in 1998 or so spending all day downloading a tiny grainy video file of the fake COPS Star Wars thing.