The link is to the event know in bitcoin as the “first slashdotting.” Slashdotting (being featured in slashdot) back in the day often drove unservable levels traffic to websites…I jumped on the white paper quickly to make sure I could still reach it before the site went down. I succeeded and I haven’t a clue whether bitcoin.org went down it not. I happened to have studied astrophysics and math in undergrad, so it only took a few minutes of scanning the white paper and googling the unfamiliar term hash for me to see how the system was supposed to work. I wasn’t burdened with good education in compsci to see the bazillion ways in which it might not work…and I was hooked from about 10 minutes in.