Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

It seems to me that the first Internet Meme was hooking up Coke Machines to the Internet. It started when Coke Machines were connected to the Internet in 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. The programmers at CMU wanted to check the Coke machine via the Net rather than walk up a few flight of stairs only to find an empty machine. Many colleges likes the idea and it was almost an Internet Status Symbol for Universities to hook their machines up to the Internet. Links about this are:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_coke.htm

http://www.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/services/drink.ucc

http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/csh-coke-machine-info.html

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~bsy/coke.history.txt

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci914561,00.html

This intrigues me.

Brilliant find – I've heard of it, but never made the connection :)

Then again, maybe the smiley face is the first meme ;)

http://www.dipity.com/tatercakes/Internet_Memes

It says so at the beginning. We should keep track of this timeline.

how about this: The Internet Oracle:

http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi

Amazing find !
As an old meme researcher, I'm intrigued.

A maverick killed goose?

I hooked into cyberspace sometime in the early 1990s, and the coke machines were legendary at the time. Sometimes it seems that people think that the Internet began with the World Wide Web or is the WWW, but there was a very active life on the Internet before the WWW.

THIS HAS INSPIRED ME

We now require a Meme Timeline.

It looks like the Internet Meme Time Line agrees with me. Thanks to Erwinator for pointing out this web site.

No problem

While that timeline agrees, many memes aren't included in it.
I'm really intrigued with that thing. I'll do a bit of research on it, for a possible entry.

DO IT YALL, DOCUMENTATION IS NECESSARED.

This is indeed interesting. I look foward to working my way through many hundreds of letters of computerized text for my enjoyment and/or pleasure