Mick Knutson's BLiNC BLoG

The question keeps coming up "How did BLiNC" start?

Well, this is quite a long story, so I will BBLoG this in phases....

A long, long time ago (1994)....

I had been trying to use my new found Internet programming knowledge on a real world application, not just a well formatted resume. Up to that point, there was very little in world of the Internet. And prior to that, I was a distributed control system developer (DCS) in refineries in Houston Texas, then in LA, and SF.

At this point I had been BASE Jumping for 2 years under the wing of Adam P. of Consolidated Rigging.

In the Spring of 1994, I kept hearing about "Bridge Day" and how I could finally get to jump with other people and start to really share some knowledge about the sport. But then I started thinking, I want to be able to get more out of the sport more often that just Bridge Day once a year.

The light bulb went off! I could create a way to talk to other similar to nntp news readers and IRC chat. I started hacking on such a way to do this. Obviously it was just me for about a month while I was hacking away. Then on a nightly base expedition, I ran into Harry Parker and Dennis McGlenn. I was excited about the potential prospect, and told them about it. The loved the idea and wanted to see more. So I spent a great deal of my time that Spring and Summer hacking away at it. Back then, Google did not exist. So I had to call and email people to ask them to come check out the page.

I was actually surprised at the speed in which I started getting more and more hits and posts. I say it honestly started in July 1994 because that was about the time I started calling and really announcing this page.

Notice I never called it the base board yet....

Well, I found putting in 40-50 hours per week after my regular full-time job was just too much for the momentum I think I needed. Luckily, the same time I was hacking away, so way another Net guy creating WWWBoard! Perfect!

I could just kick start my forum there. So I implemented it. But it FORCED me to create a variable with a forum "Title". I could not leave this thing blank...... What to call it.....???? The default was "The WWWBoard".

I was impatient, and wanted to get to the real work! So I called it "The BASE Board".

So the name begins.....

Part 2...