Who Started this Place? History?

I've been enjoying and learning from this site on/off for years.

I'd love for some old timers to chime in and share the history of this place. Who started it, why, etc. And how it's changed over the years...

Let the history lesson begin!

Thanks!

It was a small sub-group 'TechTalk' on a forum called recording dot org. 'Kev' was a major member. Forum management wanted to take the forum a new way. Many members objected. Kerfuffle ensued. A new forum was built, first under the website of a studio-gear seller, later flung off on its own.

This seems to be the oldest thread here:
https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=3.0

Awesome PRR, thanks for sharing!

I just jumped to that thread...so many names I used to see all the time. Where are they now?

Is there another forum I don't know about?

Im newish here ,but yeah the name Kev does ring a bell from a good while back ,well before I contributed
Its formed itself in a good little gang of specialists ,none with the holy grail in hand ,but most with something to contribute, I wish I had this resource years ago ,when I asked the shoehorners and facilitators of industry about valve electronics and was told your old hat son .The big joke about the chemical/industrial here was ,'they gave out chemicals that stopped our dicks from working for years, now we retired they handed out viagra shares and unlimited supplies of the phizer riser but the wife dried up years ago' .
Im upwind of one of the biggest chemical plants on the planet ,those on the leeward side have an incidence of cancers multiple times the average ,jobs are more important than public health though ,especially to short game playing politicians.The locked loop of public and private healthcare will bear the cost in any case.

Anyroad ,dont begrudge the accumluated knowledge of generations ,strive to dismantle the senseless institutions we've created in the name of profit,and it'll all marry up in the end .

I joined late in 2006. I did not realise the forum was little more than a couple of yeas old then. It seemed like it has always been around even then.

Cheers

Ian

I remember this forum arising out of another one, in line with what Paul above has stated. I remember the former with Kev. I thought Kev was from Australia? Wonder where he is today? Anyway, that was around 2003.

I still remember those days when we were banned from the first place I forget the year . Huh

I think you could be right about Kev being an Aussie , I think he had a page called Kevs Diy , Jacob Gyraf used be around there too,maybe he knows

BTW old threads were tranfered from prodigy-pro.com?
PS: Kev's page is diyfactory.com

I wonder what Kev is up to these days?  My first DIY was the Green Pre that Peter had designed the boards for and Kev had a walkthrough on the build. 

Mbira said:

I wonder what Kev is up to these days?  My first DIY was the Green Pre that Peter had designed the boards for and Kev had a walkthrough on the build.

Click to expand...

his website no longer works. I had to look at the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20110513133902/http://www.diyfactory.com:80/
Some REALLY good stuff there.

Wonder what happened?

Moby said:

I still remember those days when we were banned from the first place I forget the year . Huh

Click to expand...

Oh! Now I understand why some members have "I was banned too" in their signature! It all makes sense!

But why were people banned? I'm getting out the popcorn - dish!

Phrazemaster said:

Oh! Now I understand why some members have "I was banned too" in their signature! It all makes sense!

But why were people banned? I'm getting out the popcorn - dish!

Click to expand...

Very cool.....Is this seat taken???

I was banned too. 

As I recall it, we were banned from the recordingDOTorg site for two reasons.

Firstly for being (keen) members of the Tech talk sub-forum.
And secondly for collectively objecting to becoming a switch to a pay-to-use site.

The objection to the latter was because we TT guys had created most of the content and freely donated a lot of resources, and wanted it to continue as free access. (Most of the other sub-forums were similar in style to GS now, with more hot air than facts.)

But basically I woke up one morning and could no longer access the old site.

Thankfully within a few hours GroupDIY was up and running.

That's how I remember things. I'm sure the forum moderators know more.

Stewart

> old threads were tranfered from prodigy-pro.com?

It was the "same" forum. I do not know if there was a machine change then; there have been several others.

Prodigy Pro was a studio gear dealer with a web-store. Our Ethan did the web-work. When talk arose about starting a new forum away from the old one, Ethan got his boss to host it as a folder under the ProdigyPro web site. The domain was registered, there was space on the server, and for a going business a forum is not a big added cost.

But the BIG music stores got into web-sales. I guess PPro's business dropped, and the web-store closed. I suppose then the domain registration and the server contracts were expiring. So our Ethan registered the GroupDIY domain and took on server costs. (Please help him! Button at bottom of page.) My impression is the server did not change, just the name/URL. Maybe he did box-up the message files and copy them to a new server overnight; not my job to know. Aside from the address (and cherished bookmarks), nothing changed for us. All the PPro posts are here on GroupDIY, like they never went anywhere.

PRR said:

> old threads were tranfered from prodigy-pro.com?

It was the "same" forum. I do not know if there was a machine change then; there have been several others.

Prodigy Pro was a studio gear dealer with a web-store. Our Ethan did the web-work. When talk arose about starting a new forum away from the old one, Ethan got his boss to host it as a folder under the ProdigyPro web site. The domain was registered, there was space on the server, and for a going business a forum is not a big added cost.

But the BIG music stores got into web-sales. I guess PPro's business dropped, and the web-store closed. I suppose then the domain registration and the server contracts were expiring. So our Ethan registered the GroupDIY domain and took on server costs. (Please help him! Button at bottom of page.) My impression is the server did not change, just the name/URL. Maybe he did box-up the message files and copy them to a new server overnight; not my job to know. Aside from the address (and cherished bookmarks), nothing changed for us. All the PPro posts are here on GroupDIY, like they never went anywhere.

Click to expand...

That's a pretty incredible story, and speaks to the Ethan's wizardry!

Thanks for sharing PRR and Zebra50!

I remember the subforum on RO, but forgot it was called techtalk. I recall even earlier, 20 years ago going through the newsgroups and coming across rec.audio.pro and being amazed at all the free recording advice from professionals.

Not long before the meltdown or whatever happened, I wrote a longish post about my experience getting two patents at a large company, and was disappointed that I hadn't saved a copy for myself, as I had forgotten what all I had said.

I do recall some of the controversy, there were a lot of equipment schematics posted, apparently at least one from then-currently-made products, and there was objection from those at the companies making the equipment.

My account here 'benb' dates to 2012, but I'm sure I was here much earlier, and indeed I found an older account benbradley that I apparently never posted with:

https://groupdiy.com/index.php?action=profile;u=61

Maybe I could have these merged, but I don't suppose it matters.

benb said:

I remember the subforum on RO, but forgot it was called techtalk. I recall even earlier, 20 years ago going through the newsgroups and coming across rec.audio.pro and being amazed at all the free recording advice from professionals.

Click to expand...

I was on rec.audio.pro for several years before discovering groupDIY. The signal to noise on rec,audio.pro was worse that gearslutz and there were some really vitrioloic posts. I was glad to leave it behind.

Cheers

Ian

ruffrecords said:

I was on rec.audio.pro for several years before discovering groupDIY. The signal to noise on rec,audio.pro was worse that gearslutz and there were some really vitrioloic posts. I was glad to leave it behind.

Cheers

Ian

Click to expand...

I remember r.a.p. circa 1995 or so!  So much stupid in one place.  But I was young and dumb too...