Kazer0 wrote:How about the year before wally came, or the 5 years before that?
Sure.
The host website,
www.dosgames.com, was started in the January of 1999. For the next 2 years, it had a series of rather... bad, small message boards that were eventually replaced by a 4 forum UBB board, which became moderately popular. This was the state of things when I started posting May 4th, 2001. (Yes, I've been here 4 years)
This board lasted until around October/November of 2001, when it died and Emmzee replaced it with a new board users here have affectionately titled the Ghetto Board. It was pretty much a website version of Usenet, with the technological sophistication that implies. (None whatsoever) Da_Goat still insists this model was far superior to our current system.
The only members of that board that are registered here are myself, Thunderdog, Da_Goat, Jean, Nanobot, and Kazer0. (Though Kazer0 and Nanobot only made a couple of posts)
After we realized just how insecure that model of board was, a new board was created June 1st, 2002. This board lasted 3 months, but drew over 100 members, most of them the "oldbies" of the current board, such as NPS, Moo, Lakerzz8, Wardrich, Oz, Winger, Ally, 486 Player, and Meh (The ol' Warez peddler). There are probably a couple more I've forgotten. This is also when I became an admin/mod for the board.
Anyway, this board (IBB) ended up being hopelessly buggy, so we updated to phpBB in September. This forum works well, and has remained our forum software since then.
Early in 2003 I overhauled the forum structure, which is essentially the one we have now, plus or minus a couple of forums. (Notably Game Reviews, Game Exchange, Game Creation, and Forum Games, which have either been deleted or will be shut down soon)
This was followed by the addition of a second website to the forum, dosgamesarchive.com. Later in the year, a third website, dosgamesonline.com joined.
Since then, things have been more or less the same, barring a server change or two and a couple upgrades. We've gone from 10 (active) members to nearly 1000, though there've probably only been 150-200 that I actually remember.
Another member will have to fill in for the histories of dosgames archive and dosgames online before we merged histories, and I have no recollection of their respective forums.