How this forum came to be

[darren adcock]

just wondering how this forum started?

Be nice if there was a write up about this on here somewhere? unless i've been unable find it?

 

[dave9]

Probably the same as many forum oriented sites. Several people wanted it and one of them was motivated enough to DO it. I don't know when it started but another factor may be that old timers used to use usenet but then ISPs stopped offering it (*free with an ISP plan*) and usenet was quite limiting in only being able to post plain text and links to things.

Google tried to do something more with usenet and Google Groups may still be around, but I don't see the point today, as there's no advantage to it for most people.

 

[davenn]

@Ian
will be able to answer those questions

 

[Ian]

Sorry for the slow reply Darren, I've only just seen this post now. Funnily enough, I've been planning an upgrade to the forum software and I'll be adding a more detailed "about" page when we upgrade, including a bit of history.

The site first launched in 2005, coded during a summer break at university. I ran a couple of other forums at the time, so decided to combine my passions of electronics and running communities to create ElectronicsPoint. At the time, there weren't many electronics sites around, so newsgroups were the main way I discussed electronics until forums like this got off the ground. The site didn't really take off for a few years, so was pretty quiet initially - but in around 2009 onwards it got so much busier (take a look a the join dates of some of the regulars to see who to blame ).

 

[darren adcock]

Sorry for the slow reply Darren, I've only just seen this post now. Funnily enough, I've been planning an upgrade to the forum software and I'll be adding a more detailed "about" page when we upgrade, including a bit of history.

The site first launched in 2005, coded during a summer break at university. I ran a couple of other forums at the time, so decided to combine my passions of electronics and running communities to create ElectronicsPoint. At the time, there weren't many electronics sites around, so newsgroups were the main way I discussed electronics until forums like this got off the ground. The site didn't really take off for a few years, so was pretty quiet initially - but in around 2009 onwards it got so much busier (take a look a the join dates of some of the regulars to see who to blame ).

Yeah i think more on the "about" link would be great including a bit of history, i'm sure at some point there'll be more of an acknowledgement of these type of communities, I remember pestering all my local repair guys, amp fixers etc to show me stuff until i found here

 

[FuZZ1L0G1C]

At the time, there weren't many electronics sites around, so newsgroups were the main way I discussed electronics until forums like this got off the ground.

Now that you mention it, I dug out an old handbook "The Internet and WWW", which lists their selection of newsgroups to visit for specific subjects / topics of interest - "Electronics" not in index.
However, I remember using Gopher etc to search, link to and download or print (ASCII-based) schematics and text from related sites such as universities, telecoms newsgroups, etc.