Does any of the mod's know exactly how many members remain since the old winmag (i think) forum? That's about the time I found this community when Win 95 was giving me so many headaches. There's lot's of familiar names that seemed to have vanished. I mean from the number of members just before that site moved!!!

Dave101

"The only goddamn thing you know about the law is how to break it." Chief Lafleche

Since we began using this DC Forums script at PC911 exactly 12,821 people have registered. Many of these only visited once just to get an answer to their problem. A few represent duplicate registrations from people who forgot passwords, or changed their names.

The number of active members has. I suspect, remained fairly constant over the years, but I have no figures to prove that. The Winmag forum we remember started because the release of Windows 95, the first of the modern Windows operating systems, caused a great deal of confusion among computer users. Windows Magazine was a well established source for information, and the forum drew both experienced users to help, and inexperienced users to learn.

People have their lives to live, and move on to new concerns, Many of the people who helped others are still around, most of the people who needed help have left and been replaced.

Shelly

It was a sad day when Windows Magazine went out of existence. I've yet to find a print publication that was as helpful.

And some like myself, while never a member, spent time there taking in what was available.

Nightly Reader

From what I remember, the WinMag forum was originally formed by a bunch of guys who were win98 beta testers. Scotterpops--Al--Mike Egan---Scott Finney and many more. I think casca was also.
It started going to hell when WinMag split the forum and gave 5 jokers a section to moderate.
Then CrazyGerman started PC911 and we migrated there,with Jason as our Webmaster, Then crazygerman became crazyXgerman and got ants in his pants and wanted to move on.
So a bunch of peeps banded together and fingered out the cost of a new forum home and PCQandA was born.
So here we are.

Any corrections and omissions please add on .

LilJoe

Roll call!

Also, a lot of the old crowd have changed their names since the winmag days. If you can remember your old forum name, state that.

Grogan

Still Shelly as it was then. I lost about 5000 posts when it closed.

Shelly

No change.

It is nice to see the old names when they drop in. And, I've decided to dust off my old Winmag sig.

JP

My current forum name is the same one I used on the old WinMag forum.

>Roll call!
>
>Also, a lot of the old crowd have changed their names since
>the winmag days. If you can remember your old forum name,
>state that.
-------------------------------------------------------------

Mines the same except the ' was choking the forum and had to be killed.

LilJoe

Hey, incidentally...how do we locate the old PC911 Member Collage? Or
the last PCQ&A Collage? I tried "Search" and didn't turn up anything...

DavyWavy -

>Hey, incidentally...how do we locate the old PC911 Member
>Collage? Or
>the last PCQ&A Collage? I tried "Search" and didn't turn up
>anything...
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dave,send me an email and I will send you all 3 that I have.

LilJoe

You will find a link to the latest collage at the top of the "About PCQandA" tab at the top of every forum page.

Shelly

Wow! A trip down Memory Lane with all the pictures in the PCQ&A Collage, Shelly...thanks for pointing me to it. And interesting to see
the backgrounds on our current Mods there, too.

DavyWavy -

Shelly, I may be wrong but I think that there was a later collage than that.

edit: this was the one that I was thinking of...........

Attachment #1, (jpg file)

>Shelly, I may be wrong but I think that there was a later
>collage than that.
>
>edit: this was the one that I was thinking of...........
>
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------
This one is from 2003, I have saved a total of 3 different ones.

LilJoe

LilJoe, I don't remember a third collage, when was it made?

I'm not sure of the date ,send me your addy and I'll send you what I have.
I was able to identify the 9-2002 (it had the date on it) the one with my wife and I was in 2003.

LilJoe

We should make a new collage.

>We should make a new collage.
>
------------------------------------------------------
I agree!! With updated pictures? I don't know about that though.

LilJoe

Yes we should because there's some new people here now. Who's clever enough to do it?

>Yes we should because there's some new people here now. Who's
>clever enough to do it?

LilJoe

Dave101

"The only goddamn thing you know about the law is how to break it." Chief Lafleche

>>Yes we should because there's some new people here now.
>Who's
>>clever enough to do it?
>
>LilJoe
>
--------------------------------------
No not me , the fellows who did the originals should have the honor to continue their good work, How about it, Bobbo and Balo?

LilJoe

Well, I originated the first one and Balo modified and improved the design. I had started a thread in which I requested that people upload pictures of themselves which were then resized and arranged into the final montage. So,... let's start a new thread and request current pictures.

Ya mean I gotta shave and take a new picture? I was getting ready to pose for Holy Pictures at Christmas time.
Let that Dave 101 start a new thread and I'll break out the camera.

LilJoe

>Hey, incidentally...how do we locate the old PC911 Member
>Collage? Or
>the last PCQ&A Collage? I tried "Search" and didn't turn up
>anything...

Damn, I'm about 50lbs lighter in my photo in that collage.

I dug some screen shots up that I have been saving over the years (It's nice to keep back-ups )

A screen shot of one of the final days of the WinMag forum:



A goodbye collage:



When PC911 shut down the forum:

http://cyclingcaptured.com

thanks for the pic AnthonyS - from the list on the right - I guess I was there.


richardc

I've been bobbo since WinMag. Althought I once registered as boob, which explained my competence at that time, but I've gotten a little bit better.

Still using them same name. Here is a copy of the picture that I made when we moved. At least you can see some of the regulars of that time and determine which ones still post.

http://www.pcqanda.com/collage.shtml

Still here, though not near as active as I'd like to be.

I was a regular poster (question asker) back at Winmag. I got my first computer July 1997 and it was Win95b. I was using FLA4845 I think. Or maybe it was FLAMom - those were the two names I used back then.

While not always active on the current forum, I'm a regular lurker -sometimes more than others.

I have lots of fond memories of many members who have passed away, and those gone on to other things.


Barb

It is surprising that there are still a lot of people here that were at the Winmag forum. It was extremely busy back then when Win 95 came out and then Win 98 came with even more problems. I don't frequent a lot of different forums but few have had members remain as long as this one has. Al, Wenchie, Lawyer Lynn, and a lot of others have fallen by the wayside as Shelly said as life caused them to move in other directions.

We even had Jason move on from Winmag itself to PC911 and he is still here. Winmag was the last magazine I ever subscribed to.

Ed W.

"IN GOD WE still TRUST - ALL OTHERS, WE used to MONITOR"

Wenchie still drops by once in a while, so does Xin.

Shelly

I drop by about 18 hours per day.
I still have a coupla computers with PC911 case badges on them.
I also think we could raise some money if we had case badges with the PCQ&A logo on them.

LilJoe

I've seen Wenchie a couple times over the past couple years but I only remember Xin showing up maybe once. Folks here who don't know Xin would be blown away by his knowledge.

MSU

Yeah I miss Dan.

I'm still Les and still hanging around.

Les

I still have copies of all 3 collages starting with PC911 in 2002 by balo and bobbo. We never could get Jason and Beth to send a picture.
Too big to post.

LilJoe

People left the winmag forum in droves after they switched to windows server software. Just like clock work the forum would be down for the weekend, every weekend starting at about 9PM est! As more posts were made the server would go down every few days. lol

Alex started the PC911 forum just before winmag switched to the shitty windows server software, but Alex used the rock solid Apache server software in GNU/Linux, hence the server stayed up for years at a time without requiring a reboot.

It didn't take long for people to realize that the winmag forum just didn't cut it anymore. Hell, by October 1999 you never knew if the forum would be up or not at any given moment.

You don't have that problem at pcqanda now do you. Thanks Grogan!

You may have other issues, but the server is always up and ready for your input. Remember that during the next fund raiser.

Winmag switching to windows server software is the number one reason that the community dispersed in 1999. It had no choice as you couldn't depend on winmag being up, online when you needed it. And PC911 never gained the winmag community spirit that had developed between the start and end of the winmag forum.

I remember the end time of winmag, they would get one or two posts in a week. Not much reason to exist at that rate.

Anyways that's how I remember it, and I'm sure that my recollection is not 100% inline with the events of winmag forum in 1999.

It's been 6 years now and I have forgot the overwhelming vast majority of the original winmag forum posters. Who ever they were I wish them well!

gagirl and autotech come to mind.

Actually that is not quite accurate.

The Winmag forum was ruined by Winmag deciding to put their columnists in charge of it, and dividing it among them. Winmag wanted to take complete control of the forum. Shortly after that Windows Magazine went belly up and stopped publishing. The forum was taken down. Yes, there were some software problems, but they had nothing to do with the death of the forum.

Fortunately Alex had already started PC911 and invited everyone to come there. Alex decided that he needed to devote more time to his career and family, and decided to end the forum after a few years of operation.

Most of the members started looking for a new home on other forums, as I did too, but I could find nothing that held a candle to PC911. Finally, I decided the forum could not be allowed to die. I contacted all the moderators and asked them if they would participate if we could launch a new forum. All agreed. We needed an experienced webmaster, Jason had been the webmaster for Winmag, and I approached him to head up the new forum. In a moment of weakness that I'm sure he regrets to this day, Jason gave in to my arm twisting, and PCQandA was born.

Shelly

>

LilJoe

Yes I think that you're probably right.

And a big thanks to you Shelly my good man for your part. As someone one once said "You are the intellectual glue that holds this forum together", you can be hell on wheels at times but always reasonably fair to everyone.

Don't remember Winmag.

Do remember PC911.

Must have been between 1999 to 2001 I joined.

1st one to post that isn't a Charter Member and doesn't remember shit from those days because I came along in March of '02!!!


Yeah!

Visit the Basement

>1st one to post that isn't a Charter Member and doesn't
>remember shit from those days because I came along in March of
>'02!!!
>
>
>Yeah!
-------------------------------
Don't feel bad Adam, ya don't see no freekin charter on me either I'm a newbee. I got castrated by the forum also

LilJoe

The winmag forum kept going for a while (we weren't the death of it), but Bob's kind of right in that it "died" for us when the Windows server had constant software problems. In the beginning the pcnineoneone forum was a place to go when Winmag was down, but a lot of folks started to spend more time at pcnineoneone.

It's wrong to say that pcnineoneone was rock solid from the start though. While yes, it was on a Linux server, it was first on shared hosting at Interland and they really sucked. The server was often unresponsive because of other fools and their poorly written CGI scripts eating up memory and CPU time. Crazygerman then got a dedicated server at Rackspace, and that's when we had rock solid stability.

Grogan

That's not quite accurate. The original Winmag Forum script was a series of server-side perl pages that referenced (IIRC) a text file. When I was put in charge of it, we were having a problem with it crashing and taking down past posts. So I started looking for forum software to switch to.

Around this time, CMP Corporate started reigning in the Winmag crew. Up until this time, we had pretty much done our own thing and succeeded because of it. But we were forced to switch from Outlook to the corporate standard of Lotus Notes (*shudder*) and our web site was to use the standard CMS that everyone in corporate used. Along with this, they wanted us to go with their own forum system. This system, however, was a piece of.... er, junk. I showed it to the members at the time and they pretty unanimously hated it.

Meanwhile, I found a nice piece of software called BuzzForums (again, IIRC, but I'm pretty sure about the "Buzz" part). This was built on ASP and SQL Server, so I could add features to it. (The other forum was corporate controlled and I wouldn't be able to add anything to it.) Everyone loved it, but my boss said that we were going to have to go with the corporate package.

Luckily for us, he happened to go on vacation and I pressured *his* boss. His boss was more agreeable that the Buzz package was superior and we should go with that.

Things were looking up for awhile, but the server developed a nasty habit of leaking memory. Of course, it would only happen on Friday night and I wouldn't find out about it until mid-day Sunday. The best I could tell, some parts of the Buzz software were leaking memory pretty bad, but I could never find out just what was doing it. Again, memory is sketchy, but I think there were some custom DLLs that the Buzz software installed. That was my main suspect, but I couldn't quite fix it. Oddly enough, the server never really went down. It would chug along no matter how much RAM the Buzz DLLs ate up. It's just that page load times went into the toilet when the server was running on 1K free memory.

PC911's forums were started, in part, to give people a place to gather when the Winmag forums went down. Then the community there took off and coexisted with Winmag until Winmag was killed. (When Winmag shut down for good, I ditched my "administrator" username and took "JasonLevine" instead. That was also the birth of "Jason's Toolbox".)

Shelly's pretty much summed up the PC911->PCQandA transition, though I would add that Beth was a big help too. I considered the PC911 forums one of the last remnants of Winmag (albeit a transplanted remnant) and I wanted to keep it alive. I wasn't sure I could take on such a big responsibility though. She approved of the deal though and helped work things through with me to get it up and running.

Without Beth's support, PCQandA wouldn't be here today. (Big standing ovation for Beth, everyone! )

(When Winmag shut down for good, I ditched my "administrator" username and took "JasonLevine" instead. That was also the birth of "Jason's Toolbox".)

The missing link!!

Dave101

"The only goddamn thing you know about the law is how to break it." Chief Lafleche

As you are, so shall you remain until I come again!
Jesus Christ to Casca Rufio Longinous.

I remain, Casca.

Under Construction

Amen!!!

Nice to hear from you Dan! Drop by more often!!!

Dave101

"The only goddamn thing you know about the law is how to break it." Chief Lafleche

I do not remember my PC911 signin name back in 2000 or so. I joined PC911 because I was having fits with Windows 98 (never ran Windows 95)

*Though you can still find PC911 (pcqanda) by Goolging: "PC911.com"

Beth, thank you!




i also remember how lost we were, no place else felt like home.

someone bought pcnineoneone, but alex made sure they saved the help files we were all used to. or something. and pcnineoneone is still archived on this site.

many of the previous members i thought were very altruistic and philosophical when i first joined- i couldn't believe i'd found such a place!

flops, you joined before me cause you're a charter member. (i must've just missed it!) i joined in jan., 02 below is a link to my welcome thread.

isn't it amazing how much dubber used to post!

http://www.pcqanda.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=2&topic_id=28351&mesg_id=28351&listing_type=search

Where is Goolging

LilJoe

I've been around since WinMag. My nick there would have been the same or pretty much so - no imagination.

You might find this thread interesting: "Introduce yourself, won\'t you please...."

Jim.

Hi FOlks -

I've been here since the WInmag forum in 1997. My original user name was Eric in AZ.

Eric

My current forum name has always been the same - I used to read the WinMag forum- can't remember if I actually joined.


richardc

Another one I'll never forget is old dude who maybe stops in one a year.

LilJoe

I tried to email him again but his mailbox is full,I will have to call him on the phone and help him empty it. We were talking pretty regular until his book keeper (wife) complained about the phone bill

LilJoe

>

LilJoe

i found some old documentation dated 3-99 from the winmag forum regarding help i received from "gary p" and "sir fer"...that's about the time i first started seeking help at winmag.

i think it was mid '99 or a bit later (??) when i became a member ("rookie") of pc911.

when pc911 forum closed, i think some of us members migrated over to bitbender forum(???) until pcq&a fired up...

Rookie

Visit the Basement

I went over there, but only as a 'quasi-member' (topics, etc. )... after Tuffie passed on , I left there - got too weird for me...but I was always a member here
Lonnie

Just went over to check it out. First time there & almost went blind!
Non pas pour moi. I made my home here & this is where I'll stay!!!

Dave101

"The only goddamn thing you know about the law is how to break it." Chief Lafleche

Lonnie

Strange isn't it, some of the people that make up this forum can nearly drive you crazy yet the place is addictive.

I was member of WinMag even subscribed to the magazine. Went to PC911 then to this forum.
The only magazine I now subscribe to is PC World.

I joined back when it was PC911. I don't know what year I joined, but it was quite a few years ago.
I don't post that much, as you can see by my post count.

When Winmag shutdown I had my mag subscription transferred to Maximum PC,which I get to this day for $12 per year. Also get PC World, keep both handy in my library. (which is the bathroom)

LilJoe

I joined PC911 in 2001.

I think I joined in late 1999 or early 2000, I enjoy the information and the friendship of many members, and I have to say that I have learned quite a lot, about computer maintenance and repair. Thanks to all at PC nineoneone/PCQandA
Cheers,
Richard.
Computer Specs here:- http://www.yachtcha.com/Specs.html
Website http://www.yachtcha.com
Its nice to be important, but its important to be nice

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/getDynamicImage.do?memberName=oldgit&mnOn=true&stat=1&imageNum=3&rankOn=false&projectsOn=false&special=true" frameborder="0" name="di" scrolling="no" width="125px" height="176px">

Do we have a mirrored life? Same two mags and preferred reading space.

I joined PC911 (and PCQ&A after that ) few weeks after getting my first PC , Dec.17.2001 .
I learned all I know from all of you and so very much

Jane

When was Alex on Tech TV? (I think)..That was when I came to PC911 for some help. Grogan and Vitalt obliged. Such a simple solution today was a major operation back then.

PW

I got my first computer in late 1999. Lightning hit our apartment building, my computer started acting up, and the tech where I worked referred me to PC911 in 2000.
After replacing almost every part in the computer, with the help of a lot of patient people here, the problem turned out to be a zapped CPU fan.
It would have been a $5 replacement, but I'm glad it didn't work out that way from the beginning.
I have 3 computers I built, rebuilt and upgrade, learned a lot, and met some great people.
I don't visit the computer forum as much as I used to -- I attribute a lot of that to getting rid of Windows 98 -- but I still crunch for our distributed computing team, and still consider this place home.

McGee

And it will continue to be your home as long as you treat your sister like a Princess, I used to have three now I'm down to one.
Sisters can not be replaced

LilJoe

I got my first computer in 1999 as well. After having some problems and talking on the phone to Dell support, my computer was even in worse trouble. Once it was finally sorted out, I decided I needed to learn how to maintain and fix my computer on my own. I found this site and have learned alot. Over the years, this site has helped me tremendously and has saved me ALOT of money.

My first computer was a British 48K ZX Spectrum in 1983. It was a small keyboard plugged into the TV and programs loaded via a cassette player. Can't remember when I joined PC911.

Attachment #1, (jpg file)

I forgot. Technically, this was my first computer, back in 1982.
The Kaypro II.

McGee

I guess since we're being technical this was my first computer I got as a freebie in 1992, the Tandy TRS-80. It loaded programs by CLOADing from a cassette tape.

What is CLOAD anyway? thats all I remember from it and typing programs up a line at a time:

10
20
30 etc...

Visit the Basement

Well guys here's my first PC



And here's the specs

MSU

Attachment #1, (jpg file)