By: Brian R.
As some of you know, this site got its start nearly five years ago, on March 15, 1997. It began on the Tripod free web system, and used their built-in guestbook software to create the forums. It didn't occur to me at the time to save any of the old messages as an historical record, something I later regretted.
Last year, a kind soul sent me some archived pages from these early days. Unfortunately, I didn't save his name, so I can't give proper credit. If he wants to contact me, I'll do so. Unfortunately, the archived pages don't quite go back to the beginning, so we can't see the very first posts, but it's pretty close.
I've plucked out a few of these pages, so you can look back at the old days. For the ones who have been here since the beginning, it will be a trip down memory lane. For newer readers, you can see how things were back then, and some of the proto-forms of later features.
I have added some comments at various points, which will appear in this soothing shade of blue.
The first page was from March 27, 1997. We had been going a couple of weeks, so the pace had kind of been set. The messages don't go back all the way to the beginning, I'm not sure if I deleted some messages (Tripod restricted your account to 200K total size) or if there was some problem early on that caused some to disappear.
I have removed any email addresses (most are no good after this long a period anyway, and there is a link added at the top of the page to get you back here. Naturally, the form no longer works, so don't bother with it.
March 27 1997
Here's one from a few weeks later, includes some of the first moderation of the page.
April 8 1997
Let's jump ahead a month or so. Here we have the first discussion thread of one of the enduring topics of the page.
May 17 1997
Our final one is from the end of June. Note the debut of a vidcap page that sustained us for so long, and that we recently lost.
June 30 1997
Well, that wraps it up. I hope you enjoyed the look back to the early days. You could see some of the similarities to the current page, but also the features we lacked. Like a reply feature, or even a Title field for the messages.