Wow, I never knew how this site came to be. And congratulations Mr Greybeard!! Here's to many many more!
That really wasn't the story of how this site began but only the NEF/H&R Section on it.
Some time around mid to late '96 Matt tried to convince me I needed a computer. I asked him why in the world would I want a computer or to be online as he was trying to convince me I should be. He said that anything I wanted to see or know was on the internet. Of course at that time it really wasn't.
I told him to show me something online that would be of interest to me as all I had every seen him do was mess around with what I think were at the time called IRC chat rooms and that sure was of no interest.
He searched around a bit (remember this was long before search engines came about) and found I think it was Remington's site and one or two other gun or hunting related sites so I told OK build me a computer and he did. At first he let me use his ISP account which of course was a dial up as that's all there was back then and I think the modem was something like a 12k or some such super speed turtle.
I spent some time online and found at most a half dozen general interest shooting and hunting type sites. If there were more I sure wasn't able to find them. I remember Hunt Info, the Coffee Shop and Shooter's which seemed to be the big three. I forget the names of the others now. Of them only Hunt Info still exists and it is not even a fraction now of what it was then.
Around that time folks were beginning to set up personal websites mostly with just a bit of info about themselves and their hobbies and I asked Matt to set me one up. I had by then gotten my own ISP account and they allowed me a small bit of space for a personal site. He asked me what the heck I wanted with a site and what I wanted on it. I told him I didn't really know but I'd write something about me and my interests and perhaps share some of my knowledge of shooting and hunting with others. So reluctantly Matt set it up in that free space and we soon outgrew that and we bought the Graybeard Outdoors.com domain and set up some forums using Bravenet Free Forums software. Can you believe they allowed a total of 200 posts per account back then. It was in cascading format so when you exceeded 200 posts they clipped the oldest which often let responses but not the post that started the thread.
It didn't take us long to realize that wasn't cutting it so Matt wrote a software program to do forums on and we set up our forums using that. We grew so fast that his software was straining to keep up. He found a commercial software using the type format we use now that it seemed was becoming popular at that time. I hated to see the old cascading style go but it was necessary for the site to grow.
In the early days of the site you entered by clicking on the front door of a house we had lived in back in the early '90s that I had taken some photos of after a snow storm came thru. This image isn't the one that was our home page initially but is close to the view we used.
The image used was taken from a bit more to the right so the tree wasn't blocking the door but otherwise (except for the poor quality of this image) was the same.
When you went to the GBO Home Page in those days you got to listen to the music from Amazing Grace. Many folks said they came to the site just to listen to the music. Early on we had other music that played when you clicked other pages as well.
GBO got started during '97 tho I have long since forgotten which month. It was at the time just a really tiny personal site that gave a bit of an outline of who I am and what my interests are. It grew from that to me sharing my many years of experience in handgun hunting and other shooting sports and then we added forums.
It took off like a house a fire and well the rest is history and has resulted in what you see here today.
