And lo, in the beginning there was Avsig - not internet though. Direct dial up bulletin board - ask an old person about acoustic couplers connecting at 300 baud
Avsig has been around for just about 30 years.
Danny and I met on Avsig along with several other regulars who joined us on what was to become PPRuNe. We found it too US centric and was one of the reasons for setting up PPRuNe. Oh yeah, Danny wanted a better job as well......
Strictly speaking PPRuNe wasn't the first on the new fangled internet either - the Irish lads got there first but it was a static site rather than a daily, living thing - they switched to a bulletin board format later when it caught on via PPRuNe.
PPRuNe was simple hand edited HTML pages. Folks wrote to us and we cut and pasted the e-mails onto the page then fired it onto the server via ftp. After a short while we had to include hot points within the text so you could follow the thread of an argument. We created an email edition at the request of 3rd world contract pilots in places like Viet Nam - bear in mind we were stunned that they asked. In the first 3 months the site received 700 hits but somehow word of mouth had already crossed the globe.
By the spring of 1997 we had JetBlast as a second forum which was a place for all the jokes we got sent plus a home for the virulent posts regarding the '89 pilots dispute. The Ozmates had well and truly discovered a new medium for sledging each other
Tech Log was next but the limitations of straight html were becoming apparent. Danny had had to start playing with scripts to get the e-mail version automated and it then became a natural step to experiment with the earliest bulletin board software. Danny usually had to be surgically separated from his perl and cgi manuals most nights.
It was at this stage that the clones started kicking off - lots of target audiences - mainly geographic but also by specialisation. Other than the Irish site the only one I can thing of with 5 year plus longevity is the german one but there are several now with a few years under their belts.
That's really about it. Over the last 7.5 years the site has changed in some way just about every day then but the basic concept has stayed the same. The site and its readership has grown hugely but at every stage of its life it has seemed huge. We have honestly lost count of the number of servers we've outgrown.
If it means anything to you, we use 400 gigabytes of bandwidth each month which for a text based site is rather a significant throughput. We get over 40,000 separate visitors per day who view around half a million served pages. Despite all this Danny is still known to occasionally speak to poor people and his family.
Anything else anyone wants to know or have more detail revealed from the dusty recesses of my memory please feel free to ask.
Regards
Rob