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  • Discussion Forum

    Discussion forum

    Happy 12th birthday, OSY!

    Forum post

    Author
    Message

    Jeremy Reimer
    Posts: 9342
    Posted on: 2013-02-21 14:58:28.000
    Twelve years ago, on February 21, 2001, OSY 1.0 first went live.

    It ran on my personal desktop computer, a staggeringly powerful 733MHz Pentium III, which at the time was running Windows 2000. The server software was a free Windows-based server package called Omniweb that has long been forgotten by the ravages of time (and no, it had nothing to do with the NeXTstep web browser of the same name).

    It was a jury-rigged setup running the flaky, file-based Ikonboard software, and I had no idea what I was doing. I set up the site to be a kind of alternative to the Battlefront on Ars Technica for when I got sick and tired of the Battlefront and all the Battling that went on there (much of which was my fault!)

    For a while I was an absent landlord, as personal issues (the need to find employment and later, in September 2001, my wedding!) and I didn't post much. In fact a thread by Imitation Gruel on October 22 entitled "Will Jeremy Reimer ever return to OSY" showed that I was really very bad at posting on my own forum.

    In August of the next year, I had installed a proper forum software (PHPBB) and thus was born OSY 2.0. This forum prospered. It lasted nearly ten years. On February 22nd, 2011, Imitation Gruel again posted a thread entitled OSY's tenth anniversary is this week to celebrate the combined age of OSY 1.0 and OSY 2.0.

    OSY 2.0 reached a maximum of 490 users, and although many of them were spambots, there were over 50 users with more than 100 posts to their name. Yet even as Ars Technica moved over to PHPBB, I was already thinking of its replacement.

    Monarch, or OSY 3.0, went live November 29, 2010 and took over from OSY 2.0. Because I didn't directly port over OSY 2.0's user database (a chance to clear out the spambots, I thought!) there have been fewer active posters on OSY 3.0. But for me Monarch was a triumph, as it represented a personal achievement of learning a new language and developing a web content management system from scratch, skills that got me a promotion and a substantial raise at work at the time.

    Now, on the 12th, anniversary of OSY, I'm in the position of attempting to use these same skills to launch one or more public web applications with the hope of actually making some money from them. This would never have been possible if I hadn't been so frustrated with how hard it was to merge accounts with Drupal and PHPBB, and I wouldn't have that frustration if I hadn't been inspired to install PHPBB in the first place.

    While OSY isn't as heavily trafficked as it once was, it is my hope that slowly the users will come back to check things out. I've relaunched my whole site using my own newLISP on Rockets web framework, a technology that makes it really ridiculously fast and easy to make new websites (as if newLISP didn't make it easy enough!) The new responsive design reflects the changing world where many of us check websites on our phones instead of on a traditional computer.

    For those of you who came along with me on this grand adventure, thank you! You guys have been awesome the entire time.

    Jeremy Reimer
    Posts: 9342
    Posted on: 2013-02-21 19:00:49.000
    Some notes about the logo: I've taken the logos from OSY 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 and merged them all together into one glorious whole!

    (Cue David Lister from Red Dwarf saying: "You already ARE one glorious hole!")

    These were the OSY slogans from the original logos:

    OSY 1.0: "Peace. Love. Post-Whoring." This was a take-off on IBM's bizarre ad campaign "Peace. Love. Linux".

    OSY 2.0: "The World's Most Powerful Personal Forum." This was a riff on Apple's slightly-suspect claim that the Macintosh was "The World's Most Powerful Personal Computer." Remember, this was back in the days of PowerPC.

    OSY 3.0: "Only OSY Makes it Possible". This was taken from the original Commodore slogan, "Only Amiga Makes it Possible."

    So over all the years we've made fun of Linux, Macintosh, and the poor Amiga, who really didn't deserve it. The only platform we never made fun of was Windows, because Windows makes fun of itself. :)

    Ajar
    Posts: 2413
    Posted on: 2013-02-25 06:29:25.000
    Digging the new logo. :)

    AllYorBaseRBelong2Us
    Posts: 10468
    Posted on: 2013-03-05 03:15:09.000
    Happy Birfday!!!

    really enjoy the look of the site.

    :)

    Jeremy Reimer
    Posts: 9342
    Posted on: 2013-03-06 19:27:22.000
    Thanks, AYB!


    Views: 6342