Joined: Fri Aug 30, 2002 1:09 am
Posts: 8509
Location: Southern California
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Thanks for the very appropriate topic, Ed.
The internet has been a wonderful thing in various ways. After a couple of articles I got published in Forth Dimensions magazine in the early 1990's, Wally Daniels who used to be active here contacted me, and we exchanged reams of emails about the 6502. This was back when much of email was text-only, and sending email to someone who used a different service could be a challenge. As things got going, he wrote to me in Sep '99 (and I'm sure he won't mind me quoting),
Quote: There is a http://www.6502.org that you should check out. It is a conglomeration of users and their homebuilt projects. It is a fun place to go when you think you just might be the last 65xx user on earth !
There was my introduction. Little did I know what this would turn into!  Soon I also found the Delphi 6502 forum Mike started on Nov 25, 1999 and was running before he moved it to 6502.org and ran it under phpBB. Delphi apparently became harder and harder to deal with, and was even uncooperative when Mike wanted to move the data over, so he wrote his own program to read every topic and post as if it were a human reader and arrange them in phpBB. Brilliant! And I'm so glad he did.
Wally, BTW, had post #7777 on this forum.
In Nov 2000, I wrote to Wally,
Quote: I've been in contact with Mike Naberezny (host of http://www.6502.org) about some of the stuff we've talked about and he's pretty excited about it. He says he'll do whatever it takes to help me get my stuff up
Mike did a lot to get some materials of mine posted at http://6502.org/users/garth/ around 2002, ten years before I had my own website, and before I knew anything about html.
part of Wally's reply:
Quote: I have not given a web site much more thought after Mike got 6502.org going. His site is everything that I wanted to do and more. Mike is a great guy and one of those people who make the Web a real community. I first met him back around 95/96 when I sent him some 65xx datasheets after answering his request on usenet. We have not talked much of late (1 year maybe) but he is always ready to pick up where you leave off.
Thankyou, Mike!
Paralleling this forum in the early years, there was also the 6502ag Yahoo group. I was on that, and saw it get destroyed by spammers. I was determined to not let that happen here, which led to my being a moderator. You won't find anything charming about what I have to say about spammers. We definitely had our challenges. There were a couple of years when they sure tried, and it took an almost crippling amount of my time to stay ahead of them. Then Mike came up with some measures to automatically keep most of them out. Again, thankyou, Mike! Now when one does sign up, we have ways that we can usually tell they're spammers even before they post. The Yahoo group is still there, but traffic is pretty much zero after what the spammers did to it so many years ago. Yahoo (all Yahoo groups) has become more and more difficult to use, whereas Mike has a great thing going here that works quite well. Again, thankyou, Mike!
It was probably in the early 2000's that I said something about the 6502.org forum at dinner, and my wife asked, "What's that?" and our then-highschooler son said, "That's where everyone asks their questions about the 6502 microprocessor and Dad answers them." Well, since then, we've gained a lot of members who know a thousand times as much as I do about various areas, for example programmable logic, video, and OSs. It's great that we have such an array of users, and although we share the basics in knowledge, in another respect there's not a whole lot of overlap in areas of expertise.
We keep the archives for a good reason. It's not like facebook which has no categorization and it's difficult to find anything more than a couple of weeks old. From time to time, I have reasons to go back through old materials and get a much-needed memory refresher. At the same time however, I am impressed with how far this forum has come over the last 10 or 15 years. Although the 6502 came out in its original version 43 years ago, the community has actually been getting stronger, not fading, the resource pool has been getting richer, and the knowledge base has been spreading, again thanks to this platform Mike has given us! Many of use do have our own websites, spurred on by 6502.org, and that's great, but 6502.org is still the hub.
My own work goes in waves, and I have not been as active here this year as I would like; but I'm optimistic about the future of our shared interest.
_________________ http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?
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Indeed, Great idea, BigEd 
