The history of this blog is the history of my computers. From Luddite to semi - computer literate, the unfolding pages in the development of my own PC's lead directly to this clumsily typed word!
My first foray into publishing anything online was a list of old toys I had for sale. It was done on a huge Compaq PC in Word and Paint and published via AOL around 1993 or 4. Here's what the homepage looked like, MOONZERO TOYS, screengrabbed from a shaky file on a floppy disk [thanks for the loan of the floppy reader Bill!].
Persevering on my huge home PC I then set about my first real bit of toy research in 1997/98 and compiled the Project SWORD toys Checklist. Initially I envisaged it being a paper-based booklet but then published it online December 1998 on Alphadrome [thanks Brian] and TV Century 21 [thanks Kelly - sadly the page no longer functions] and published a short update in January 1999. Here's a screengrab of it on Alphadrome now, still there after 15 years!
Reaching new heights of excitement and IT prowess after the Checklist, I decided in 1999 that what I needed was a Project SWORD and SPACEX website. Armed with Dreamweaver I think and haranguing my daughter's computer-savvy Year 10 boyfriend I began the mammoth task of creating a website from scratch. Discovering the joys of hyperlinks I fashioned a site with multiple pages covering all SWORD and SPACEX toys I knew about at the time. Alas, like all mammoths, it ran into a tar pit and died! Grand in vision but ultimately failing to launch online, here's all that's left of one of the index pages. Moonzero was the forerunner of the name Moonbase Central. There's also a unfinished ROXY TOYS page. Both are grabs from an old virtually unreadable floppy.
Licking my wounds for several years after reaching too high into the perilous cyberverse, I came back down to Earth and launched a very simple SWORD TOYS site on Yahoo in 2003. By now I had ditched my gigantic PC and moved to my first PC laptop. Floppy disks had gone the way of the Dodo and memory sticks were in.
No trace of my first online SWORD site exists now because Yahoo deleted it, although I received many emails from it at the time so I'm not imagining it! Here's a mock-up I've done today of what each page sort of looked like.
Which brings us back to Doh! Yes, the next step in the creaky evolution of this site was the birth of Moonbase Central itself, September 15th 2008. A second laptop PC now warming my midriff, the first masthead was dead simple 'cos I did it! Bill did this second snazzier one shortly after, in 2008, which he has updated a number of times since, including a special one-off called Aurora I think, when I was on holiday [sneaky beggar!]. So that's it.
The rest, as they say, is the future!
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