This is extremely brief at the moment. Oh, well.

The first LBJ collector and KotLBJL that I, David T-G, found was a guy named Brian, who was last seen in the UK quite a while ago. I had the distinct privilege of corresponding with him on and off for quite a few years, and I last heard from him around 1996. I've since seen an archived page at laughnet which reports "Tally so far as at 21/05/95 - over 700 questions with over 1100 answers, plus LOTS of other bits and pieces" and also mentions a few mirrors on the web, but those are now all dead and don't provide any further hits regarding Brian's whereabouts.

Meanwhile, Marcus Hennecke had his own list, full of jokes from friends and rec.humor.funny and occasional other sources. He eventually found Brian's list and incorporated the jokes he didn't have, and sent his list to Brian and got a reply indicating similar intent. Unfortunately, he, too, lost touch with Brian.

Marcus had his light bulb page up at his Stanford site, where I discovered again after a desperate search for the classic surrealist joke with the machine tools punchline.

Marcus helped me find the particular joke and punchline, and reported that he no longer had CGI capabilities and didn't really have time to maintain the list anyway; I casually offerred to host the site for him. Marcus sent over a tar file of the site for review, and I was the newest KotLBJL before he knew it. Amazing how things happen at 'net speed -- even after four months of almost just about nearly getting ready to poke at the contents :-) I converted the site from CGI to mod_perl, redid the counter from his server (no SSI), and wrote the little stats program as well as emptying out the main index. (In fact, I haven't even done all of that, but I will soon enough. Really.)

That's it so far :-) For more info on light bulbs, you might like to surf over to thinkquest to see their history (of the real thing, not of the Joke List). I found it heavily JavaScript-ed and that it loads lots of graphics, so I didn't explore it; have fun.