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Posted by Scott Paterson [Email] (#13) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Scott Paterson) on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 09:57:21 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: Re: The Saab Network is 25 Years Old Today!, ahanson [Profile/Gallery] , Wed, 2 Oct 2013 08:44:37
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Well, here's what happened and some of the highlights.

My first car was a VW Bug that I bought for $200 and painted black and yellow stripes (a bee, which symbol which would be present in many aspects of my life)... When that died, I bought a Rabbit that had a souped up engine from a VW mechanic... eventually it was too much power for the standard transmission. I was looking to get Scirocco's and my then girlfriend (now wife) was driving an '83 900 Turbo and she convinced me to go look at some used Saabs. I found a 85 900 base sedan and bought it. In the fall of 1988, it had a water pump issue and I went on Usenet looking for help and posted on rec.autos (there were no rec.specific.makes groups yet). The replies were all bogus ("You should've bought a Ford/BMW/Etc...). So, I decided there should be a resource for Saab owners to discuss this stuff and created The Saab Network mailing list which had about 100 owners in its first year and peaked at around 3,000+ owners. The discussions from that mailing list, which I had archived, became the basis for the initial and original TSN web site which was hosted on a server at my rented house (shared with 4 other roommates) and connected to the Internet over an 18 mile wireless connection between Los Altos, CA and the top of the Fairmont building in San Jose, CA.

In the first month the site was online there were 197 users and fewer than 1,000 pages viewed. The current record for number of users in a single month is 251,049 and pages viewed is 7,277,307. The 100,000,000 page was viewed in 2002. The one millionth message was posted to Saabnet.com in 2003. The one billionth hit was in 2005. The logs are now so big that I have a hard time keeping up with these stats anymore. When I save the compressed backups of the site to offline media, it used to fit on one DVD, but now I'm at two. Over the years, Saabnet.com has sponsored many Saab events including national conventions and rally/race cars as well as donating significant amounts to many charities. TSN has always been managed and produced by me using Mac computer of one type or another starting with a Mac SE with a 20GB hard drive to today when I use my MacBook Pro with 500GB SSD drive & 1TB internal drive & 1TB external drive. The server has always run some form of Linux starting with Slackware and then moving to Red Hat Linux. When this server dies, it'll move to CentOS which is based on Red Hat. Somewhere in the mid 90's, the server moved from Los Altos, CA and was hosted by Jason Philbrook and Jason Simonds who founded and owned Midcoast Internet Solutions in Maine. Around 1999, it moved to my home and ran on a T1 that was expensive, but required for the bandwidth. Last year it moved from the T1 to Comcast Business class for a boost in bandwidth and a reduction in cost. From 1988-1996, every penny to run TSN came out of my own pocket. From 1996-present, sponsors, members, and site advertising has covered the costs.

There have been some hiccups... I remember the server in Maine crashing hard. The main disk was corrupted and the backup disk in the same server was also corrupted at the same time. That sped up the change as we restored to a server I had set up on the home T1 from a remote backup. It worked great, but it took an entire day for the whole backup to transmit over the net.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but if anyone has a question, I'd be happy to answer it.

-Scott
_______________________________________
Saabnet.com Webmaster
Saabs Owned:
1973 Saab Sonett III (Current)
1983 Saab 900 Turbo
1985 Saab 900 Sedan
1990 Saab 900
1992 Saab 900S
1999 Saab 9-3 Turbo
2005 Saab 9-2X Aero (RIP 95K/Accident-guy ran stop sign)
2005 Saab 9-2X Aero (Current)
2007 Saab 9-3 SportCombi
2010 Saab 9-3X Wagon
Winner 1996 Saab Owners Convention Rally Novice Class
Winner 1999 Saab Owners Convention Rally (All Classes)
Also Founder of two non-profits:
Poverty2Prosperity.org
RunClubMenloPark.org
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