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Post by 89toyrobb on Mar 15, 2005 21:48:27 GMT -5
I was just wondering when this site was officially on the net? I notice the oldest date is 7/03, but I remember checking this site online in early 02.
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Post by Mike Kelly on Mar 16, 2005 9:37:53 GMT -5
Good question... I started the ORIGINAL forum in March of 2001. It was small at first, but grew fast. Problem was that the forum itself, the software that is, was a piece of crap. Not to mention, I believe they wanted to start charging for use. So, I then created this board, as you see it now, in July of 2003. As for the site itself, that is a longer story.... It started originally as a geocities site, you know, the free crap you get that is full of pop-ups ads and banners. Well, at that time, my hobbies were a bit different. The site consisted of 3 parts, pics of me and my buds mudding in our Toys, pics of my old VW beetle along with some beetle history/information, and of course, beer. One day I was looking up domains, and what did I find? toyotaoffroad.com was available for purchase! No one had EVER used it! I immediately bought it up and parked it for a few weeks until I could setup a site on a server at my work (I am the network admin, so I have those privledges). From there, I set up the original site - REAL basic at first as I was teaching myself to code websites and had NO experience doing anything like this at all. I basically just started with some pics of our trucks, and some stuck pics. What really got the site going was when I opened the photo gallery to submissions. Everyone wanted to send me a pic of their truck. Then, when we were mentioned in 2 different issues of Petersons, I knew we were on to something. Time for a forum! Here we are today, almost 2000 members in the forum, over 1200 trucks in the gallery, an official sponsor, and we are selling products with our name and logo on them. It's come a long way from the crappy geocities site thanks to the visitors and the fact that we promote an awesome vehicle. But what really helps our site is that we are newbie friendly. We are designed for all types of wheelers. Stocker to crawlers, we support them all - without being flaming jerks. ;D Stay tuned, there are bigger things to come!  |
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Post by 89toyrobb on Mar 16, 2005 11:17:21 GMT -5
Thats awesome  I remember reading the forums back in Jan. 02 and I remember there being alot of posts, so I figured it had been up a whole lot earlier. Boy has this site changed since then. Im glad it has been able to stay friendly and not a bunch of jerks like "other" forums. Keep up the good work |
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Post by Joe_Dirt on Mar 19, 2005 3:53:31 GMT -5
www.archive.org/ use the wayback machine.... they catalog every update done to a website. it should have what the old site looked like...
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Post by Mike Kelly on Mar 22, 2005 14:06:32 GMT -5
Thanks for that link... Wierd looking back...
Gets me thinking of some changes that may need to be made....
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Post by fourwd1 on Mar 22, 2005 15:21:54 GMT -5
... use the wayback machine.... Now that goes way back too  And, FWIW, you can tell the members from the original board by the TOR in front of their member status. |
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Post by 94cnytoy on Mar 25, 2005 7:28:36 GMT -5
It's just too bad that 5yrs is "way back".
Way back to me is:
1st computer
Texas Instruments TI99-4A.
or the Commodore 64.
or the big upgraded Commodore 128
Then we bought my uncle's Apple IIe
Green screen baby......
My brother back in 83-84 was a founding message board creator. He and his friends devised a dial-up network for hacking games programs.
Had that beautiful rubber telephone contraption...
that's old.#nosmileys
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Post by fourwd1 on Mar 25, 2005 8:05:10 GMT -5
And you used to walk 15 miles to school, in the snow cause you couldn't get the horse and buggy out of the barn, and it was up hill both ways, and ...
;D
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Post by DrumBum on Mar 27, 2005 2:04:06 GMT -5
it was funny, i was having that same conversation with some guys a couple days ago. one guy was probably in his 30's or 40's, the other in maybe his early 50's, and me being 18, they were asking about all kinds of stuff... "so, do you remember this, or that, or whatever"... some stuff i did, but most i didn't... just funny how different generations can grow up so completely different, and yet we're still all here together
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