I've been planning on developing a little history presentation on Oldgas for our 10th anniversary this coming January. OK, I haven't started on it yet. LOL Here's a little info since you asked.
In January 1996 I started a Web site called Primarily Petroliana on the home page space provided by my Internet service provider at stlnet.net. I developed it because I couldn't find a central place where an enthusiast could find links and info about petro collecting. At first, it was mostly links to other places I found and a list of events. More stuff was added a little at a time.
My ISP had a built-in guestbook, so I utilized that. It was very popular, but a guestbook format doesn't support a thread structure so conversations about a topic were near impossible to follow. It served well as the beginning of our Collectors Roster in July 1997. I wasn't allowed to have a forum or other interactive content, so I started thinking about my own server and domain name. I signed on as an Amazon.com associate in 1997 and actually sold enough gas station books to afford the cost of the server and domain.
In December 1997, I registered the Oldgas.com domain and leased a server. I moved everything over to the new address just in time since my old ISP went out of business after that. The first version of Shop Talk was a free script called wwwboard. It was a success more quickly than I expected. You can see archived Shop Talk 1.0 pages by scrolling down on the Oldgas.com main page to find their links. Here is a link to the earliest Shop Talk page:
http://www.oldgas.com/shoptalk/98a.html I found that I had to periodically close down a Shop Talk page and open up a new one to keep the thing to a workable size. It was cumbersome, but popular. There was no registration and few rules, but we had fun. Some familiar names can be seen on those early forum pages.
In February of 1998, Iowa Gas and Time Passages each had me develop and host a Web site for them. This brought a little income for Oldgas.com and some more mainstream content as well. In the fall of '98 I re-organized the Collectors Roster into the regional system we have today.
You can get a look at some vintage Oldgas.com pages at the Internet Archive:
archive.org Here is an example from their archives:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202031453/http://www.oldgas.com/
In the summer of 2000, I realized I had to upgrade Shop Talk to have any decent organization and user friendliness. Income from banner ads and Amazon covered the purchase of the software. That is the software we use today.
For the first six months of the current version of Shop Talk, registration was not required. So the "registered members" number didn't start until 2001, three years and thousands of posts after the beginning of the Shop Talk forum.
Hard to believe it will be 10 years in January.
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Jim "Oldgas" PottsYour host and moderator
