About history of osdev.org forums

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Ycep
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About history of osdev.org forums

Post by Ycep »

Hello, I was wondering about osdev.org forums history a while.
Oldest viewable posts on all forums are mostly made by Chase, (http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=682) in January of 2001.
It seems pretty interesting that forum which is old already 15 years in its beginnings had 2-3 members now has 10453 members and 250842 posts.
Clicking on older posts justs prompts a message "The requested topic does not exist.".
After bit of research, I found several sentences that osdev.org originates from something called "megatokyo".
Is this correct?
Can anybody tell me a short story about osdev.org history?
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Schol-R-LEA
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by Schol-R-LEA »

Briefly: one of the two (or three?) fora that were eventually merged into OS-Dev was a forum on a message board called Mega-Tokyo, originally hosted on Geocities IIRC. It was primarily a site for supporting an FOSS reimplementation of the AGI and SGI game interpreters originally used by Sierra Online in the mid-1980s. I am not sure how it came to host an OS forum, but I assume that one of the mods had an interest in the subject.

I was on the Mega-Tokyo forums for a while in 2002-2004, but mostly dropped off of them for various reasons. When I came back briefly in 2006 (I think), that site was closed, and the OS forum merged into another one and re-posted here, though I gather not all the posts were recovered.
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by drunkenfox »

That's quite interesting
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by Love4Boobies »

There's a short timeline on the wiki, if you're really interested.
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by jojo »

Wow, what? This place has origins at Megatokyo?

It kind of amazes me that Fred is still truckin' along on it. Love the guy, but I'm not even sure you could call what he's got going on over there a plot anymore. Just checked in a few months ago after most of a decade away and, yup, still just meandering all over the place.
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by klange »

jojo wrote:Wow, what? This place has origins at Megatokyo?

It kind of amazes me that Fred is still truckin' along on it. Love the guy, but I'm not even sure you could call what he's got going on over there a plot anymore. Just checked in a few months ago after most of a decade away and, yup, still just meandering all over the place.
Not that Megatokyo, though I have some affiliation with that one.
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Re: About history of osdev.org forums

Post by Solar »

Schol-R-LEA wrote:Briefly: one of the two (or three?) fora that were eventually merged into OS-Dev was a forum on a message board called Mega-Tokyo, originally hosted on Geocities IIRC. [...] I am not sure how it came to host an OS forum, but I assume that one of the mods had an interest in the subject.
If I may?

Mega-tokyo.com was host to a static website called the "OSFAQ" (the origins of which I was told once, but have since forgotten). Naturally, discussion of the OSFAQ, individual projects spawned off it, and additional information became part of the site forum.

Eventually I annoyed df enough to host a PhpWiki on his site, so errors and shortcomings of the OSFAQ could be fixed by anyone, not just himself. I actually administered that Wiki installation for a while. That gave a definite boost to things, and became the foundation of what the OSDev.org wiki holds today.
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