There were no "members" until several years after the site began. It started from a few pages of links and scripts I had on my company site about 10 years ago. The cabl.com domain came in 1996 after encouragement from some people on the SCTE mailing list, where many of the first members came from.
CABL originally had a lot more than the Bar, like a search engine of only cable-related sites, an archive of the SCTE-list, the library and tech sections (pathetic as they are now, still there on the main page) and some others. I spent a lot more effort on the list archive, the search engine, and other parts at first. The Bar was just another thing there. It was a simple set of scripts originally. There was no membership or login, you put in your e-mail address every time you posted.
At one point (1999?) CABL got a major renovation. New search engines like AltaVista made the cable search engine less important. The SCTE list got its own archive software for its list manager, so that too wasn't a priority anymore. The Bar became the focus by default. In the makeover I moved from Unix to Windows and wrote the new Bar completely from scratch, eventually adding memberships and all that.
Account #1 was the Archive account used as the "member" id for the messages already in the database when memberships were added. Account #2 was the original "admin" account used mainly by someone that worked for me at the time. I'm #3. After that it was whoever signed in first. There were about 1000 accounts created the first few weeks, many of which are still active.
The reason the Registered: date for all of the first few thousand members says "Long ago" is there wasn't a date assigned to new accounts then so I can't tell the exact date, though it's not hard to approximate from other data.
As of today there are something over 38,500 accounts registered.
Re: Questions for Admin
Member #: 3
Registered: 1996-2001
Posted:
602
Name:
Admin Account
Company:
DBMV Solutions
Occupation:
Web site Guy
Location:
New Jersey
Personal:
late 50s
Experience:
~35 years
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