What are some of the oldest internet memes?

Back in the 90s, the first meme I ever came across was Mr. T Ate My Balls, which according to Know Your Meme is 20 years old next year! (It later split into two separate memes, one where various celebrities and fictional characters ate someone's balls, and another where Mr. T was causing various kinda of mayhem.) But surely there must be internet memes older than that? What was the first one you experienced?

when was Mahir? Probably about 1999 so maybe a bit late.
That song about squirrels going WHEEE?

What's the squirrel song, I can't remember it?

GONADS AND STRIFE!!!!!

From 2001, according to Know Your Meme.

Google search says it was the dancing baby gif and also All Your Base Belong To Us

http://www.dipity.com/tatercakes/Internet_Memes/ has some early ones. I think Ate My Balls was the first one based on images.

In that timeline, the first proper meme appears to be "greenoch" from 1991:

Greenoch - Greatest Martial Art of All Time
16 May 1991
Tired of people making ridiculous claims about the lethality of their chosen favorite martial art (which at the time seemed to be ninjutsu), a Usenet rec.martial-arts contributor named Doug Welch invented a fake Scottish martial art called "Greenoch".

Many readers immediately took it seriously and a small flame war ensued, with other readers jumping in to fan the flames by claiming that only they, in fact, know the real true Greenoch.

Eventually Kata (martial arts forms) are posted, weapons described, and the meme for Greenoch becomes firmly embedded in the interwebz.

Usually the editing would go no further than the person having a scrotum in his mouth.

On that original "Ate My Balls" page, I don't think you could get more 90s than The Ate My Balls Webring! I remember clicking on the "random" link on that ring when I was bored, finding countless examples of my balls being eaten by Mr. Spock, Bill Gates, the Muppets, etc.

I like his gallery of award gifs. I don't remember this being a thing when I first got on the internet (early 2000s).

http://web.archive.org/web/19981202133702im_/http://www.vbe.com/~nwyman/award.gif

I remember those award gis. Some of them were more acclaimed and well-known, like Cool Site of the Day, but most of them were clearly just random person handing "awards" to site s/he liked, so they were pretty pointless.

Whoa, I had no idea Dancing Baby started as early as 1996 too! (Though still a little bit later than Ate My Balls.) It must've been one of the first moving-image memes, right? I can't remember seeing it on the net before it was on Ally McBeal, though.

Also, lol that this page still exists:

KRAZY KEITH'S
(almost complete)
"ATE MY BALLS" LINKS PAGE!

In retrospect, most of this are pretty dumb! They're not funny at all! Why did I think they were so back in the 90s?

Like seriously, why did I find this funny?!

http://artemis.centrum.is/~loftur/kramer.html

I guess it was just the novelty of seeing photoshopped images of celebrities doing weird shit? That was still new then.

"Tunak Tunak Tun" was the first viral video I can remember, back in 2000 or so. I remember the copy on YouTube was up to 50 million but it's way more popular than that, not only was it posted to YT a bunch but it's been taken down several times, and it really blew up before YouTube even existed. I think Daler Mehdni got jobbed in a way, if that had happened now it might've been like, a "Gangnam Style"-level thing

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/62/Kiboinside.png/220px-Kiboinside.png

Possibly Kibo, and the parody religion Kibology, on usenet in the late 80s.

I remember printing out pages and pages of "Yo mamma" jokes at the school library.

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM
SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM
SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

(for true authenticity this should be x-posted across 50 different threads on all the boards)

Is the Church of the Subgenius considered to be an early internet meme?

Subgenius more of an art zine thing.

Some prankmeister apparently took Habib's song, translated it phonetically into Swedish and made a video based on those words. This site has the translation of Swedish into English, as well as a translation of Habib's song, which is about love. The title, "Hatten Ar Din," sounds like "The Hat Is Yours," in Swedish.

I think Subgenius predates the Internet, or at least world wide web?

Yeah, Subgenius goes back years and years.

there were Bob Dobbs stickers all over the place in Tucson in 80s, and a Subgenius mall preacher at the U

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.