A Pre-History of Slashdot on its 20th Birthday

Twenty years ago today, I registered the domain name "Slashdot.org". I had no inkling back in October 1997 of the massive, nerdy juggernaut it would become. My friend Jeff chipped in a few bucks to help cover the registration fees, while my girlfriend at the time Kathleen simply told me the name was stupid. In retrospect, capturing that geek outsider vibe was kind of the point!

The moniker "Slashdot" originated a year earlier in 1996, gracing the Linux desktop of the Hope College dorm room I shared with my buddy Dave. Our floor in Voorhees Hall was the first in the entire school to receive the sweet, sweet gift of 24/7 high-speed internet access. A trendsetter even then, I decided to put that bandwidth to good use.

Chips & Dips: The Primordial Slashdot

I had already been running a small news section on my personal homepage dubbed "Chips & Dips". It was essentially a proto-Slashdot – a steady stream of rants, reviews, and interesting URLs often crowdsourced from friends via email or IRC. But I quickly grew frustrated with the cumbersome process of manually updating the static HTML driving it.

Keep in mind, this was the early wild west days of the web. The concept of a "blog" was still years away. Like any good geek, I decided to write my own code to automate the site. Slashdot‘s first content management system was a mash-up of:

• Perl scripts for the core logic
• Apache for serving web pages
• MySQL for storing users and comments
• Flat text files for article data (yes, loaded on every page view – I know, I know!)
• mod_perl and FastCGI for a speed boost
• SSH, procmail and cron for the plumbing

With no grand ambitions for Slashdot, I took the quick and dirty route rather than over-engineering things. Of course, I had no idea what was coming!

For the design, I grabbed a rejected comp from a project at work and shaped it to match my spartan aesthetic – high contrast black and white with a splash of teal, gratuitous drop shadows on every element, and a grungy torn paper edge running down the side. The oldest Wayback Machine snapshot from January 1998 is missing some images, but that original essence is still recognizable:

Slashdot circa 1998. Anyone have an older screenshot?

Humble Beginnings

Slashdot‘s first server was a DEC Alpha Multia beige box that I scored for free in exchange for skinning a Space Invaders clone I built for a computer graphics class project. My game engine leveraged a sprite lib written by my friend Nate, while I crafted the graphics one painstaking pixel at a time in GIMP. The goal was to shoot hot butter at descending rows of popcorn for…reasons. The client‘s objective was never totally clear.

Performance-wise, the 133 MHz Alpha Multia was on par with a 486, but it ran Red Hat Linux 4.0 which I was excited to experiment with. My employer at the time, The Image Group, generously let me host it on their T1 line since they needed an email server and this box could serve double duty. I christened it Ariel and shoved it unceremoniously under my desk.

Within days of the DNS registry propagating, Slashdot.org was live! I quickly coded up a polls feature to ask the hard-hitting questions like "How many shots should Kurt drink?". While he suffered the results, I would tail the access log, watching in awe with my "Geek House" roommates as domains like mit.edu and microsoft.com zipped by faster than we could read.

Exponential Nerdiness

From there, Slashdot grew at a ludicrous pace. Some key milestones:

Date	Event
Nov 1997	Slashdot code repo moves to CVS
Jan 1998	"Geekizoid" meme takes off on Slashdot
Jun 1998	Michael (first admin) starts part-time
Nov 1998	Slashdot hits 100K registered users
Sep 1999	Slashdot racks its own servers (Dual P3 450 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 36 GB storage)
Oct 1999	Traffic peaks at 100 requests per second
Dec 1999	Slashdot posts 17 thousand articles in 1999
Jan 2000	Peak DB queries hit 14 per second
Feb 2000	Slashdot Effect brings down OpenSSH.org
Jun 2000	Slashdot acquired by Andover.net for $7 million
Oct 2000	Peak daily traffic hits 500K unique visitors
Jan 2001	Slashdot posts 4 millionth comment

Explosive growth brought real expenses for hardware, colocation, and advertising. The code was in a constant state of flux as I raced to implement crucial features like user accounts, comment moderation, the story submission bin, and performance optimizations to survive the unrelenting Slashdot Effect.

Slashdot‘s explosive traffic growth 1997-2002. Source: Internal server logs

We weren‘t just writing and arguing about nerd news – Slashdot became a newsmaker itself. We were one of the first sites to report on major events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the insanely controversial 2000 presidential election. Exclusives on hot topics like the Microsoft antitrust trial, DeCSS and DVD DRM, the rise of Napster and P2P networks established Slashdot as a prime hub for hacker culture and tech policy debates.

Behind the Slash

My friends stepped up to help shoulder the burden as Slashdot mushroomed in scale and popularity. We formed Blockstackers with a united mission:

• Jamie & Nate handled the sys/network admin and wrangled the ever-expanding server farm
• Kurt took on editing and helped keep the stories flowing
• Chris posted BSD and crypto pieces while moderating the unruly hordes
• Jeff spearheaded ad sales, legal, and ops as our biz guy
• Cliff ported the Slashdot code from Perl/MySQL to Slash/Apache/mod_perl/MySQL
• Tim refactored the aging codebase to support wild new features
• Jonathan kept the mobile WAP edition humming for you Palm VII addicts

What began as a solo hobby project rapidly evolved into a team effort relying on the collective passion and skills of our motley crew and thousands of Slashdot contributors around the world.

The next decade was an exhilarating yet grueling rollercoaster of wins and setbacks as we matured Slashdot from a scrappy upstart into a real business. I made plenty of mistakes and held on stubbornly as the burnout mounted. By the time I moved on in 2011, I was the last of the old guard still standing.

Slashdot‘s Technical Legacy

Slashdot pioneered many vital features we take for granted in online communities today:

• User accounts and profiles to establish identity and reputation
• Nested, threaded discussion threads
• Comment moderation and meta-moderation by the community
• User achievements like "Karma" points
• Tagging to organize stories by topic
• Polls to quickly gather reader feedback

Technologically, Slashdot helped push the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) into the mainstream. As an early exemplar of a dynamic CMS-driven site with a complex DB backend, our travails were closely watched. Battles with the Slashdot Effect taught hard lessons about traffic spikes, caching, and load balancing.

Our open source roots also ran deep. In 2004, Slashdot released our code as Slash, a customizable Perl-based web publishing system. This "eating our own dogfood" approach let the community find bugs, submit patches, and spin up sister sites like Slashdot Japan. We even hosted meetups and a "Slash Happens" con! While Slash never took off like WordPress or Drupal, sharing our "secret sauce" felt right.

Lessons Learned

When I reflect on everything that went into building Slashdot, a few key lessons emerge:

1. Engage your community early and often. From open sourcing code to reader story submissions to meta-moderation, some of Slashdot‘s best innovations flowed from the audience. Treat your users as co-owners.

2. Don‘t be afraid to reinvent wheels. Writing our own CMS gave us complete flexibility to adapt quickly. Slashdot‘s needs were unique enough that an off-the-shelf solution would have been limiting.

3. Performance is a feature. The Slashdot Effect was both a blessing (validating our editorial clout) and a curse (taking down the site). You can never optimize prematurely for the traffic you hope to have.

4. Design for failure. Broken hardware, network outages, and human error were facts of life. By eliminating single points of failure, building in redundancy, and keeping things modular, we minimized downtime.

5. Tech is only half the equation. Slashdot was as much a product of strong community norms, an editorial voice, and a business model as our code. Never forget the human and economic factors.

An Enduring Imprint

The Slashdot I knew has faded into the sunset. The tech world is now filled with venture-backed content farms, walled gardens, and surveillance-driven advertising masquerading as community. But 20 years ago, Slashdot stood out as a warts-and-all exemplar of what the web could be: a global watercooler with room for the brilliant, the prolific, the profane, and yes, the trolls. It wasn‘t perfect but it was ours. And for the price of internet access, that exchange of ideas was open to anyone who cared to dive in.

I finally understand what our "News for Nerds" mantra was really about. It wasn‘t the stories – it was the voices and connections behind them. For all its caustic flame wars and overwrought pedantry, Slashdot was a vibrant bazaar of geek culture and digital fellowship that made the internet feel a little less lonely. Slashdot didn‘t just spread news. It inspired, educated, entertained, and even united people from all walks of nerd life. And that is an enduring legacy.

So today, I raise a toast to the admins, the coders, the editors, the submitters, the posters, the lurkers, and especially the moderators who built Slashdot. You are ALL, now and forever, my people. Thank you for embarking on this wild 20 year journey together. No regrets! Well, maybe IPv6…

In the end, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda abides. And pants remain optional.