[Fot] Cheers!

[Mark J Bradakis]

Raise a glass to Team.Net!  April 11, 1991 the domain went on the air.  
26 years ago, a quarter of a century. Hard to believe it has been that 
long. In truth the foundation was laid some years before then, with 
USENET rec.autos newsgroups evolving into what became the British cars 
and the Autox lists.  Richard Welty, Dale Cook and Jim Muller are some 
names from back than.

Somehow I got involved while I was working at the University of Utah. It 
got to the point where the British car and autocross email traffic 
hosted from my desktop machine at work became a very noticeable source 
of network traffic. The powers that be STRONGLY suggested that such was 
not official university business and should be discontinued. So I moved 
the lists to a server at my house. Back then it wasn't quite so simple 
and so cheap. I sent out a plea for funding and got a great response. 
Thanks to the U of U having a good relationship with Hewlett-Packard I 
was able to procure one of the first machines with over a 100 megahertz 
CPU, a 20 megabyte hard drive and something like 8 megs of RAM.  All for 
about a mere $2,500 dollars.

Things have progressed since then. Still hosted from my house, still 
taking a bit of my time every day. Hard to believe that a scatterbrained 
procrastinator like me has been behind the curtain for all these years, 
keeping it going.  Team.Net is not as active as it was some years ago.  
The autocross list is basically dead now, but when I took the Killer 
Spit to the SCCA Solo Nationals in 1997, over half the drivers there 
were subscribers to the autocross list.

Back then there were not many choices. Now there are myriads of 
automotive related web sites, forums and such available. But there are 
still many folks who enjoy the Team.Net email lists, who love to share 
their exploits, their frustrations, their lives with like minded 
individuals.

Happy Birthday to us.

mjb.