Oldest post

[obiwac]

Hello all!

Sorry for the probably misleading subject. I couldn't find any better.
I decided to look back to the oldest post on this forum, and It's from 2001. Yet, on chase's profile, it's written that he joined in 2004. He is the admin, so he should have joined before the first post? Right?

[BrightLight]

I don't know. I have read that the site used to use a custom forum software chase wrote, before moving to phpBB. Maybe the oldest posts in 2001 were made with that old software, and then moved to phpBB, when chase created his account for the first time.
Anyway, I am not that old a member, and so someone could say something else as I'm just guessing.

[obiwac]

Ok, thanks!

[Schol-R-LEA]

IIRC, the site (or rather the parent site, see below) was running as early as 1998, which was before phpBB 1.0 came out.

I don't know what forum software was used, but the OS forums were originally a single forum that were part of a larger board called Mega-Tokyo (no relation to the webcomic of the same name), which was primarily a site for supporting an OSS re-implementation the AGI and SGI text-based game development languages and the underlying natural-language parser they used. The OS group split away in 2004, when the Megatoyko site - which I think was on Geocities originally - went offline. The new site was populated from a backup of the old site.

[obiwac]

It's so intriguing to me that all of this happened before I was born ...

[JAAman]

the OS forums were originally a single forum that were part of a larger board called Mega-Tokyo

wrong

originally there were 2 OS development forums, one here at osdev.org, and another one over at MT... they were 2 different forums, and when the MT site owner decided he no longer wanted to host the much more active OSdev forums, he transferred them here where the 2 different forums were merged into a single forum

this was actually his 2nd attempt, as he had earlier tried to move the OSdev forums to another site (don't remember which one now) but it didn't work and was reverted, after that failure, chase (our site owner/admin) volunteered to merge the MT forums with our forums here

The OS group split away in 2004, when the Megatoyko site - which I think was on Geocities originally - went offline.

the original site was online for a while after the merger (I don't know how long, since I stopped visiting that site after the merger)

The new site was populated from a backup of the old site.

wrong, it was transferred from the original site -- in fact, over at MT, there was a banner at the top of the site for a while, informing everyone that the OSdev forums had been moved here

I don't know what forum software was used,

the original forum software here was custom written by chase (our site owner/admin) and did not support fancy advanced features like accounts and logging in, attachments, italics/bold, fonts, images, and smileys (we switched to phpbb a few months before the merger, iirc)

the forum software used on the MT site was, iirc, called YABB


disclaimer:
this is all from my personal recollection, as I was a member of both sites and a mod here on osdev.org before the merger, and some details might be slightly miss-remembered

[Schol-R-LEA]

Interesting. I was only aware of the Mega-Tokyo site, and was not active on it at the time of the move (I had moved in a different direction at the time and had stopped visiting the site regularly); I picked up some of the information later, and either misunderstood/misremembered what I had read or had only gotten part of the picture. Thank you for the corrections.

[JAAman]

thinking about it now, your description sounds like the history of the wiki

we didn't have a wiki until after the merger (we did have a site with a little information about OSdev though, iirc)
at some point after the merger, the wiki was born from a backup of the old MT FAQ page

[Solar]

See, how memory can deceive you. I could have SWORN I admin'ed the Wiki already back at MT. (PhpWiki in the beginning...)