Edit:
Lex Luthor wrote:
Dancing Baby is Ally McBeal era. I know because it was on her show about 6 months after.
More or less, yeah. The Ally McBeal appearance started in 1998, but that's still surprisingly early in its life-cycle. These days, appearing on a TV show is almost a certain sign of memetic old age. It's kind of interesting, now that I think about it. This might actually make good supporting evidence that TV writers/execs really are getting even more out of touch.
/Edit
Mmm, not really. ARPANET was started in 1962. K&R C was published in 1978. You can be pedantic about ARPANET =/= Internet, I guess, but even then the picture isn't very clear. The ARPANET backbone was gradually killed off over time. It didn't completely die until 1989. So even if the two are not the same, there's no distinct moment in time when ARPANET became "the Internet". The first use of the word "internet" was in late 1974 in relation to what would eventually officially become IP in 1981. On the whole, I'd say K&R does not predate "the Internet", even by pedantic standards.
But having said that, I've seen this argument before about "hello world". I'm not convinced it's an internet meme. Well, more precisely, it's an internet meme
now, but that's been a late development in its life-cycle. Certainly people did exchange source code over the internet even back in the late 70s early 80s. But people generally weren't exchanging "hello world" programs, and when they did, it wasn't done intentionally for the purpose of spreading "hello world" as an idea. On the memetic side of things, "hello world" spread through ink-and-paper books and classrooms until the Internet became a popular place for disseminating programming (esp. C) tutorials.
That could arguably make it an older internet meme than AMB or the dancing baby, though. Apparently both of those originated in 1996. That's about when the early adopters within the general population first started coming online. But programming nerds were ahead of that curve, especially if you count Usenet. I wasn't around (on the internet) when Usenet was young, so I don't really have a good feel for it. I'm sure people talked about programming over Usenet, but I don't know if "hello world" spread memetically through that venue or not.
On that note:
printf("Goodbye world."); // :(Not to diminish from Steve Job's death, or anything, but ... UNIX and C, people.
UNIX and C! MacOS, Linux, Windows, BSD, ... virtually every modern OS and an unimaginably large number of applications are all deeply indebted to this man. But while programmers generally all know who he is, the average person has no clue that 99% of what they interact with every day is either directly only slightly indirectly a part of his legacy.