Raise a glass to Team.Net! April 11, 1991 the domain went on the air.
26 years ago, a quarter of a century. Hard to believe it has been that
long. In truth the foundation was laid some years before then, with
USENET rec.autos newsgroups evolving into what became the British cars
and the Autox lists. Richard Welty, Dale Cook and Jim Muller are some
names from back than.
Somehow I got involved while I was working at the University of Utah. It
got to the point where the British car and autocross email traffic
hosted from my desktop machine at work became a very noticeable source
of network traffic. The powers that be STRONGLY suggested that such was
not official university business and should be discontinued. So I moved
the lists to a server at my house. Back then it wasn't quite so simple
and so cheap. I sent out a plea for funding and got a great response.
Thanks to the U of U having a good relationship with Hewlett-Packard I
was able to procure one of the first machines with over a 100 megahertz
CPU, a 20 megabyte hard drive and something like 8 megs of RAM. All for
about a mere $2,500 dollars.
Things have progressed since then. Still hosted from my house, still
taking a bit of my time every day. Hard to believe that a scatterbrained
procrastinator like me has been behind the curtain for all these years,
keeping it going. Team.Net is not as active as it was some years ago.
The autocross list is basically dead now, but when I took the Killer
Spit to the SCCA Solo Nationals in 1997, over half the drivers there
were subscribers to the autocross list.
Back then there were not many choices. Now there are myriads of
automotive related web sites, forums and such available. But there are
still many folks who enjoy the Team.Net email lists, who love to share
their exploits, their frustrations, their lives with like minded
individuals.
Happy Birthday to us.
mjb.
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