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Comment by gallamine | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that Steve Job's leaving overshadows this. Slashdot has been a rock of the internet for 14 years, and I still regularly visit it. This paragraph is good:

In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars. OMG Ponies!! So many moments that I could run this paragraph for hours with moments where we shared something important, meaningful, or just stupid. But the most important to me was my marriage proposal to Kathleen. Slashdot has posted Over 114,000 stories so far. And there will be many more to come. I just won't be the one picking them.

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I think the span between the Columbine shooting and 9/11 was probably their peak. So many of my memories of /. involve national disasters.

/. is how I found out of the 9/11 attacks.

That morning, slashdot was the only news related website that would load for me.

me too, it was a strange time where i think /. was the only place that was taking bursts seriously in hosting

There was a tremendous amount of work done that morning to keep the site up. Basically the site went static for long periods, which was the only way to save the poor database servers that were screaming and bleeding from their eyes under the load. If I recall correctly there was an after-action report posted later about the technical aspects of keeping the site working that day. Slashdot had nothing near the infrastructure that many "medium-sized" websites have today, which was bad: didn't have enough hardware to survive, but also good: the bosses were close enough to the metal to make immediate programming changes to reduce the site loading.

So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.

Me too! I was trying to get a router working, and was pinging slashdot to find out if I was routing to the net. No response from slashdot - hmmmm, must have a network problem at my end. A bit later and I realised the net was up, but slashdot was down. It took me another few hours to realise that the reason slashdot was overwhelmed was because a major world-changing event was happening!

The most commented story was "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" (with 5687 comments), followed by "Strike on Iraq".

Interestingly, the most commented story on Reddit was (is?) "Obama beats McCain to become president" as well.

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