It’s funny to see satirical TV from the '80s / early '90s portraying mobile phones as the exclusive tool of the yuppie and chav – history tends to be most interesting when it’s just out of reach of one’s own memory…
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What a walk down memory lane! All those defunct companies! I don’t remember the Digital commercial, but I vividly remember that slogan of theirs: “We took the mystery out of computers.”
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The Apple II ad was ahead of its time! How could they have predicted how much computers would take over our lives hahaha
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What was the earliest internet meme?
Some lists online also cite “Godwin’s Law” and “Leetspeak” also earlier online phenomena, but those feel like a different category.
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Very good question. The thing is that it’s hard to define what an “Internet meme” actually is. If it’s just any funny / popular video then, sure, these fads from the '90s could be the earliest. If it’s a funny image with a related caption then perhaps the first memes were the 4chan lolcats of the mid-2000s. But what about the “template meme” in which one single image is used with thematic variations of partnered text? For better or worse they were the child of the 2010s.
As far as I can tell, judging by the success of “woman yelling at cat”, the template meme is still going strong at the start of the new decade. Lately I think we’re seeing a more “primitive” sort of meme appear, the textual meme which can be placed into a Youtube comment. Also, weird stuff on TikTok. I don’t understand TikTok. Maybe I’m old 
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As a parent I can see that “this thing will keep your kids busy for hours while teaching them futuristic skills” is quite a powerful marketing message.
I have fond (ish) memories of typing lines and lines of code from a magazine into a zx spectrum and then “enjoying” the fun game of figuring out if all the errors were due to my typos or the magazine’s…
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In German, one of the earliest memes is the “Merkbefreiung”, I think. It’s a form you could fill out for someone who should get “exempted from realizing anything”, or, in other words, it’s a special way of telling someone they are stupid. 
Sadly, barely anyone remembers this meme anymore.
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Please provide examples!
Here is the original one, according to Wikipedia:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981207060402/http://www.koehntopp.de/kris/inkomploehntopp/00000.html
But I also made a few at some points… ^ ^
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On a serious note, remembering the xhu vs RoyalLeela twitch games, when there was a decent chance that he’d actually win an even game :D
When were those, 2017?
Also, remembering the early stages of Leela Zero’s training, when a bug in the algorithm made her spend months climbing the DDK ranks. Then the bug was fixed and she pretty much skipped SDK entirely~
[crosspost to "I remember..." game]
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