The humor page at Rmitz.org is not important because every joke still lands. It is important because the collection preserves what a technically minded person thought was worth copying onto a personal website at the turn of the century.
Source: Rmitz.org Humor
The page was last modified on March 30, 2001. Its material is a mixture of engineer-versus-mathematician jokes, computer-industry satire, Unix-flavored one-liners, Pittsburgh driving humor and snippets passed around offices, universities and mailing lists.
One section compares software developers with drug dealers: both call their clients “users,” both have specialized jargon and both allegedly benefit from addictive products. Elsewhere a mock host-management rhyme jokes that nobody talks to a nearby host unless it is “busy, hung, or dead.”
Windows NT Completed Successfully by Failing
The most period-perfect artifact may be an error message attributed to Windows NT Server 3.51. A POP3 service reports that a dependency failed to start because “the operation completed successfully.”
That kind of text once circulated because administrators recognized the pain immediately.
The page also preserves material from older computer culture rather than merely linking to it. The owner says a BBS piece called LoserUsers was “just htmlized” from its text form, with both HTML and original TXT versions offered. There is a page about virus hoaxes and a link to the Bastard Operator From Hell collection that is already annotated as nonfunctional.
That broken BOFH link is useful evidence by itself. Personal sites often became informal preservation layers for material that had already started disappearing from somewhere else.
A Personal Canon of Technical Humor
Before memes were platform-native image templates, collections like this were assembled manually. Somebody encountered a joke in a computer lab, email, BBS or Usenet-style circulation and decided it deserved a permanent URL.
Rmitz’s page is therefore less a comedy destination than a tiny cultural archive. It records the stereotypes, operating systems, jargon and workplace annoyances that technical people were laughing about when Windows NT, SCSI, ISDN, DOOM and Quake were contemporary references.
Original page: http://rmitz.org/humor.html