Since so much Genealogy work is connected with Rootsweb, I thought you might enjoy this bit of history. AN (ALMOST) UNEXPURGATED HISTORY OF ROOTSWEB by Dr. Brian Leverich, Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative Long, long ago and in a *really* distant galaxy (about 1976 at Harvard), a young man was trying to finish a project on one of the old S-100 bus machines, whose power supply was overheating. His friends found him with his face and head fully buried in the machine's cabinet, alternately blowing on some heat sinks and sucking on the ceramic material encasing some big stabilizing resistors. This same pervert was also engaged in interconnecting computers in novel ways, doing something that was called "networking" in the academic journals but at that time looked more like a cybernetic group grope. Less long ago and in a less distant galaxy (about 1980 at the RAND Corporation), there were two newly married, recently escaped from graduate school folks who would read *every* post made to Usenet every day. On a vacation in 1986, Karen started looking for her grandfather's birthplace. She dragged Brian along for the search. That was the start of the addiction. Being thoroughgoing Internet geeks, K & B started hanging out in net.roots. Then Alf Christophersen launched the ROOTS-L mailing list in December 1987, and that was yet another place to hang out. Karen began maintenance of the Roots Surname List in 1989, when everything was done with file archives and such. By something like 1993, the Web had gotten started and Steven Woods had created the first Web-based search engine for the RSL. Shortly afterwards and largely to persuade RAND to let them dabble on the exploding Web using the corporate Web server, K and B and friends launched the RAND Genealogy Club. They created one of the earliest genealogy Websites, a site which grew so popular that it soon was generating significantly more traffic than the official corporate Website. In the Fall of 1995, K and B drove and camped their way up to Alaska with their German Shepherds. On the way back they decided they'd had enough of Los Angeles. Back at home, they sold their house in the suburbs and moved to a cabin on the North Slope of Mt. Pinos, 60 miles from the nearest wide spot on any road. Along with getting indoor plumbing, they had Pac Bell install a high-speed digital line. Moans from the telco's sales and engineering staffs were blithely ignored. About that same time RAND's management, whose obliviousness to the activities of the staff is legendary, was finally beginning to suspect something was not quite kosher on the Web server. Looking at the visitor counts, it was straining even management's credibility that that many people actually cared what RAND was. Sensing a problem in the making, K & B registered the name of RootsWeb.com and started serving the RSL and other genealogical material out of their mountainside cabin in February of 1996. They were amazed when a Dutch site spotlighted them and they got *3,000* hits in one day. In May of 1996 K & B got their first T1. A big day was 50,000 Web hits. While RootsWeb was getting started, Apple's eWorld was having difficulty hosting ROOTS-L and its sister lists. There was a major crash at eWorld in July of 1996, and RootsWeb began list serving for ROOTS-L. K & B consumed 197.3 gallons of coffee and 4.73 stomach linings moving ROOTS-L to our servers. RootsWeb began accepting voluntary contributions from its users at that point, because the costs were beginning to exceed what K & B could afford from their own pockets. In the Fall, Winter, and Spring of 1996-97 RootsWeb continued growing, adding support for the USGenWeb Archives and for many USGenWeb counties. RootsWeb discovered a call-girl ring was being operated out of one of the Websites it hosted in January, 1997. The Website was closed immediately, though there are unconfirmed reports that B archived the GIFs somewhere at RootsWeb. In May of 1997 RootsWeb adopted 1,000 Maiser mailing lists, after that server was destroyed by a spam attack from the sleazes at Atlanta's Benchmark Printing. Another 227.7 gallons of coffee were consumed and 6.38 stomach linings destroyed. At the same time the Maiser lists were settling in, RootsWeb had its final round of attacks by a cracker who had been breaking into its systems for months. Things culminated in a sort of surreal exchange of e-mail between the cracker and B, and that seems to have ended the problem. In August of 1997 RootsWeb adopted the dozen or so *large* lists still being served by eWorld. During the following Fall, Winter, and Spring RootsWeb continued to grow. February of 1998 brought the worst of the El Nino storms, and B spent most of one week living in a dark, unheated network operations center as he tended the generator that kept RootsWeb online. In April of 1998 Palladium Interactive, publisher of the extraordinary Ultimate Family Tree software, became the corporate sponsor of RootsWeb. Palladium's sponsorship enabled RootsWeb to continue to grow. The RootsWeb Review, edited by Julie Case and Myra Vanderpool Gormley, published its first edition on 17 June 1998. At present, RootsWeb hosts more than 2,700 Websites and 3,600 mailing lists. RootsWeb now has a dozen servers and five T1s worth of bandwidth, and handles more than 1,300,000 Web hits and 3,000,000 pieces of e-mail on a typical day. RootsWeb expects to be adding several more main servers and a sixth (and possibly seventh) T1 within the next few weeks. If you would like to help RootsWeb by becoming a member, sponsor, donor, or patron, please visit: <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html> Virginia Crilley 4500 Kenny Lane Waco TX 76710 (254)772-5390 Subscribe to RUFFIN mailing list: Ruffin-L-Request@Rootsweb.com Subscribe to CRILLEY mailing list: Crilley-L-Request@Rootsweb.com Homepages: http://www.eramp.net/~crilley Ruffin homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/6276 Taylor Co USGenWeb http://www.rootsweb.com/~gataylor/gataylor.htm