 3 Macs and a PrinterMatthew
Glidden Not to equate my own site's history with something of the scope of MacSurfer or the like, but I can give you a rundown on Threemacs.com for posterity, if nothing else. I originally put the site up in September 1996, making use of free Web space provided by the University of Washington, where I was a student at the time. Apologies to the Apple TIL, but there really was no collection of good information about Mac home networking at the time. A net search using WebCrawler (anyone? WebCrawler?) would net several college sites that had a few screenshots helping you get connected to the college AppleTalk network, but the only real place I found at the time was the network setup section of Networkable Mac Games (which MacGamer.com was thinking of resurrecting, but it looks like that fell through). NMG was somewhat limited for home use, since it focused mostly on gaming, but I did cull some initial setup information from there. The original name of the site, 3 Macs and a Printer, was literally true, as I had three Macs at home (Power Mac 8500, Performa 635, and Quadra 700), and my dad was tired of taking his work from upstairs (where his work system was) to downstairs by floppy disk so he could print invoices on the family StyleWriter. I didn't know really know anything about networks at the time, but I at least had heard that I could use one to make the one printer work with all the Macs, which was the desired result. The genesis of the site was a documentation of the process needed to make everything work together, with an eventual expansion into LocalTalk, Ethernet, Internet sharing, etc, over the next few years. I eventually lost my web space at UW when I graduated in early '99 and transferred to hosting space donated by DigitalCrowd (creator of NoWonder.com and MacOSX.com, among others). I watched my visitor count gradually grow from year to year, averaging over 100,000 hits per month by the start of 2001. I picked up Sustainable Softworks as a sponsor in the nonce, and they continued to make me "profitable" until just recently. "Profitable" meaning that I didn't have any expenses, but I would guess I've made about 25 cents for each hour I put into the site, just like most of us. I hadn't had much time to update the site with new technology info this year (Mac OS X, etc.), so I arranged to transfer the site hosting over to ATPM.com, the web zine I'd written articles for on and off since 1999. Threemacs.com now redirects to www.atpm.com/network, but ironically I've now found some new energy to make updates to the site, and I dare say it'll probably avoid the gradual static death I feared would overtake it. What else can I say? It's nice to think that I've been able to maintain something that's been helpful to people for several years. We'll see if it makes another five, but maybe. On the other hand, maybe computers and people will get smart enough that people won't need this kind of help five years from now (ho ho! I kill me). I guess the high point was hearing from people who were referred to my site from Apple Web support. That, and getting that first sponsorship check, which I believe I used to buy a router (geek!). |
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