The link was already dead when the email arrived.
A friend sent it anyway. The Digg URL ended in APT_GET_WIFE_pic, and he told me the first comment explained what had been in the missing comic. He thought I would get a kick out of it.
He was probably right.
apt-get was the command used to install software on Debian-based Linux systems. Put a package name after it and the machine would try to find the package, download it, and install what it needed. Replace the package name with "wife" and you had exactly the level of joke that could travel around a group of systems people in 2008.
The entire message was a sentence, a broken link, and an AVG antivirus footer. That was enough.
This was a few months after I had opened support tickets to get YUM working on a new VPS. YUM did the same general job for a different part of the Linux world. I had solved that installation before support got back to me. Package managers were useful enough to run servers and familiar enough to become jokes.
The old web lost things constantly. Image hosts disappeared. News links broke. Digg posts rose and vanished. Email kept the surrounding exchange even when the thing everybody was looking at was gone.
I cannot recover the comic from this message. That may be fine. The interesting part is who my friends thought I was: the person who would understand a command-line relationship joke without any explanation.
They were correct about that much.