One of the Biggest Tech IPOs of All Time Is Getting Bought by a Teen Clothing Store

Hot Topic, the fashion staple of suburban malls everywhere, announced today that it is buying Geeknet, the parent company of ThinkGeek, an online retailer catering to video game and sci-fi fans. While it may not rise to the M&A heights of Charter and Time Warner's $55 billion deal, it did ignite a bit of nostalgia for the tech boom of the late 1990s.

You see, Geeknet used to be known as SourceForge, which used to be known as VA Linux Systems, which — depending on your point of view — once had the most successful IPO of all time. Or the most disappointing. Founded in 1993 by Larry Augustin, the company was one of the first to sell personal computers with the open-source Linux operating system pre-installed. In 1999, while riding the peak boom years of the first dot-com bubble, they went public, shattering records for opening day pops.