Going back....Way back

Who remembers these days!!!!!!!


These were the ancient days of the CBoard. I don't know how many are still around from these days. It was a completely different board system, so user accounts did not transfer over when webmaster changed to vBulletin in 2001. I arrived either in late 1999 or early 2000...can't remember which.

Who else is here from those days? I think "nv" (who I think was the same as nvoigt) was from those days....as well as Govtcheez. doubleanti was too. I think Sunlight was the all-proclaimed guru of the board, and then he disappeared soon after the switch to vBulletin.

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Woah that is way before I joined, I like old look :)

When I was introduced to this forum in 2002, I think it already had the current board system.

Look how pretty all the boards for real dialects of C look together, not contaminated with any of that "#" crap :p

I started posting shortly before the change. Not long enough to build a good (or bad!) reputation. ;)

I started here with a friend of mine from high-school elchulomattattan or something, and then he left and I kept posting for a bit in 2002-03 and then I stopped doing a lot of programming to meet my core requirements. Then in 2005 I started programming courses again with java and C on the side. But it's been a long run, a long long run.

I actually remember when the GD board was created. Everyone was posting all the "rants" and "off-topic" discussions in the General C++ board (where else to put them?), and finally the webmaster just made the General Discussions board.

Look at the Borland compiler with more threads than the Microsoft one.

I was introduced to the boards in 2002 by a friendly hand during an early attempt to learn C++ that my workload at the time eventually rendered impossible. It would take me 4 more years to return and this time set out to fulfill this dream I had as early as the 90s.

When creating Mario F. I didn't know this early account would have been saved all these years.

I remember when we didn't have code tags or an faq. No indenting.

I joined after that but it's close to what it looked like when I first visited. Like robwhit said I don't think we had a FAQ, code tags, or colors (to add one to the list).

When I joined there was a DOS board which had a lot of traffic but eventually died. According to my join date I've been here almost 7 years. I'm getting old. I remember Sunlight and some other members I rarely see on anymore.
Doubleanti and myself were the last holdouts for the DOS board. Hehe. Good times.

:D

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Originally Posted by robwhit

I remember when we didn't have code tags or an faq. No indenting.

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Wow. Talk about stone age ;)

The trouble with some old forums (especially if they move to a new location) there are the people who know kinda all about it, and the people who just got there. I thank CBoard for giving me a warm experience if only because I could have become an outcast.

When does the forum become ten years old? Or when is the next milestone?

> Wow. Talk about stone age

Hey, just sayin'.

BTW, I used DOS!!!

I know ethic was around way back whenever we're talking about. It's kind of hard for me to remember names, but I remember some of the ones you listed (Govt, da, nv). I also remember artc, memory helped by archive.org, I admit. And one you didn't list, lightatdawn.

> When does the forum become ten years old? Or when is the next milestone?

dunno, but it was already there for a while before I got there.

> Look at the Borland compiler with more threads than the Microsoft one.

That's when Borland gave away a free compiler and Microsoft didn't, I think. I could be wrong though. maybe I just think that because I had a copy of TC++. :)

Yes Borland did. They gave away their Borland C++ 5.5 compiler (but the IDE was not free. You had to buy the IDE). Borland also had their "Ancient Software" site (which I think is now gone) which contained Turbo C++ 1.1, Turbo Pascal, as well as many other old compilers.

I remember lightatdawn, and the name artc rings a bell. The DOS board was basically just the precursor to today's Game Programming board :)

> When does the forum become ten years old? Or when is the next milestone?

I think officially it is already 10 years old. It depends on what you mean. The forum definitely existed as early as 1998, although I don't know if anyone is still here from that far back (I came in late 1999 or early 2000). By looking at archive.com, it seems that there were a few different boards before the old Ultraboard which existed when I joined. Then in 2001 the switch was made to vBulletin. So the vBulletin version of the board is about 7 to 8 years old, but the board itself is definitely at least 10 years old.

I started with C and Codebuilders, I think they're out of business but I remember wanted to create games like Ambrosiasoft's escape velocity and Harry the Handsome Executive.

Hey, look! Images as links earlier than 2001. It's prior art, man.

I joined in 2000.

Remember how I dominated everybody at our
Tetrinet tournaments? That was rad.

I must have joined prior to 2001. I graduated college in 1999 and found cprog either during college or shortly thereafter. The board says 2001 but I think that is because one of the upgrades set all the early dates to 2001. My post count is also incorrect b/c one upgrade doubled our post counts and I'm not sure it was ever corrected.

Tetrinet? Was that some kind of online tetris thing?

What I like about both vBulletin and that old one I saw from the screenshots is that they both look quite simple. No fancy curves, no unnecessary images. Probably that's how most programmers, including me, like it. :)

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I must have joined prior to 2001. I graduated college in 1999 and found cprog either during college or shortly thereafter. The board says 2001 but I think that is because one of the upgrades set all the early dates to 2001. My post count is also incorrect b/c one upgrade doubled our post counts and I'm not sure it was ever corrected.

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When the boards switched from Ultraboard to vBulletin in 2001, all user accounts were deleted and everyone had to recreate their user accounts. Nothing was transferred over (probably because the two different types of boards were incompatible in the way they stored their data). That is why you won't find a single user on here with a registration date earlier than Aug 2001 even though there are several who came here before that date. I have a pretty good memory. :)

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Tetrinet? Was that some kind of online tetris thing?

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Tetrinet was only the most amazing online tetris ever.

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Originally Posted by DavidP

When the boards switched from Ultraboard to vBulletin in 2001, all user accounts were deleted and everyone had to recreate their user accounts. Nothing was transferred over (probably because the two different types of boards were incompatible in the way they stored their data). That is why you won't find a single user on here with a registration date earlier than Aug 2001 even though there are several who came here before that date. I have a pretty good memory. :)

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Except kermi3 - he cheated and had his date set to Aug 1998.

>> I arrived either in late 1999 or early 2000

did you have the same username back then? I'm pretty absent-minded, of course. I just don't remember that username being used...

>> These were the ancient days of the CBoard.

we really should bring back the Newbie C/C++ Board, btw. :D

>>we really should bring back the Newbie C/C++ Board

Nobody wanted to post on it then and they wont now

I remember those days, I was registered with a different name but I can't remember what it was. :/

Meeeemoriieees

I had an account, believe it or not -- 'ratmilk' was the name I think.

Didn't post, because I found C too hard at the time and gave up :) (13 at the time, learnt PHP instead)

My account was under the name of "David". Then when the switch was made to vBulletin someone else got that name before me, and so I have been DavidP ever since.

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Originally Posted by Bubba

IWhen I joined there was a DOS board

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I still think we shoudl have an embedded forum, specificalyl fro embedded target issues. We could roll DOS into that, since it is still in use in embedded targets in industry to some extent.

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Originally Posted by DavidP

I remember lightatdawn

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Back when I used to, you know, post. :) All those 13H Mode and strcpy questions. "How do I clear the screen?" for the nth time, was the straw that broke the camels back and brought on the first version of the FAQ. And there was Sunlight... Personally responsible for single handedly dragging at least 1/2 the entire DOS programming community into the 32-bit era. We haven't seen religious or political debates lately of the magnatude and/or intellectual fortitude that I recall from back then either.

[/nostalgia]

It has been quite a long time since we have had a good religious debate. They used to happen quite frequently. Political debates still occur once in a blue moon, but religious debates have not been seen here for quite awhile.

For some reason they became CProgrammingly incorrect. *shrug*

I miss Dean / Troll King. I wonder if he ever graduated the
Devry Institute.

And that one guy who hated the world... CrystalSky or
something.

oh yeah i remember him. he was the source of many a flame war.

Does the WBM record cprogramming.com before Ultraboard?
I wonder how many are left from that far in the past?

Yes it does archive cprogramming.com before the Ultraboard days, but unfortunately the CBoard part of cprogramming.com is not available. The earliest date on the WBM for cprogramming.com is Dec 05, 1998. There is a link to the board as it existed at that time, and the link has the following URL:

cprogramming.com/wwwboard/index.html

It is possible that this is a link to a page that then redirected to the actual board, but I am not sure. If you then go further down the line to early 1999, the CBoard link on the main page points to this URL:

www.bobaria.com/WebBoard/WB_Messages.asp?wbid=21

This definitely is not an html page that redirects, but is a direct link to the board which existed at that time, and it is definitely not Ultraboard. (This link comes from the April 1999 archive).

The first time Ultraboard comes up in the WBM's acrhives is in March 2000.

Wow...that was a long time ago. Davvid's got it right. The change was sometime in the second half of '99 or early 2000. Webmaster and I spent a long time looking for something with a better feature set than Ultraboard...it was a big discussion about whether or not it would be worth paying for a vB liscence...Thantos now says we were wrong...

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Originally Posted by Fordy

Except kermi3 - he cheated and had his date set to Aug 1998.

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:shrug: There are some perks...

>> Thantos now says we were wrong...
Yeah, but was the other choice really available in 2000?

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Originally Posted by kermi3

Wow...that was a long time ago. Davvid's got it right. The change was sometime in the second half of '99 or early 2000. Webmaster and I spent a long time looking for something with a better feature set than Ultraboard...it was a big discussion about whether or not it would be worth paying for a vB liscence...Thantos now says we were wrong...



:shrug: There are some perks...

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Hey, I wasn't around for that discussion. Don't go dragging my name in :P

And you aren't so wrong in paying for the vB license as much as you are for giving them more money for "updates" (I can't remember if security updates are included or not).

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Yeah, but was the other choice really available in 2000?

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What is the current other choice anyway?

Invision Power Board is about feature-equivalent with vBulletin. That's the commercial alternative.

phpBB is, I believe, the most advanced open-source board software. It's also about feature-equivalent.

Then why pay if we have free and equivalent option available?

Migration is not without pain.

Oh yeah I almost forgot that part. Since now the board is so old and so grown up. It will be a hell lot of difficult to convert everything to phpBB. I think earlier phpBB did not exist.

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Originally Posted by Thantos

Hey, I wasn't around for that discussion. Don't go dragging my name in :P

And you aren't so wrong in paying for the vB license as much as you are for giving them more money for "updates" (I can't remember if security updates are included or not).

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If memory servers, when we made the switch, we bought a lifetime liscence to vB. It included all updates (security and otherwise).

They must have changed their license since then. Last I heard the lifetime only included a license for the current version and a year of updates.

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Originally Posted by CornedBee

Invision Power Board is about feature-equivalent with vBulletin. That's the commercial alternative.

phpBB is, I believe, the most advanced open-source board software. It's also about feature-equivalent.

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There are a lot of other high quality free (as in beer) forum softwares out there. Some I would argue are a lot better then phpBB.

vB was just starting then. It was a novelty and quiet an attractive one. With them not sure where it would lead business-wise, it doesn't surprise me that at that time they would issue lifetime licenses.

They still offer lifetime licenses, it just doesn't come up free updates. Just to be clear I'm going off what people who have used it have told me and not personal experience.

>> What is the current other choice anyway?

The one that kermi3 was referring to is SMF. I find it to be not quite as polished as vBulletin, but there is one feature that is so much better that it makes SMF easily the best forum software I have used (as a user). That features is the ability to remember what has been read and what hasn't. Take too long of a bathroom break on vBulletin and all your threads are marked as read.

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Originally Posted by Daved

>> What is the current other choice anyway?

The one that kermi3 was referring to is SMF. I find it to be not quite as polished as vBulletin, but there is one feature that is so much better that it makes SMF easily the best forum software I have used (as a user). That features is the ability to remember what has been read and what hasn't. Take too long of a bathroom break on vBulletin and all your threads are marked as read.

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Or if you are like me and switch back and forth between machines then the posts will show up as unread after you have read them on the other machine.

Oh in the interest of full disclosure: Until recently I was a developer for SMF so obviously I'm a little biased.

I'm confused. What are you folks talking about?
Threads stay marked read in here with only a few exceptions which I always attribute to bugs in the code. vB doesn't have cookie based read history.

Threads get marked as read when they haven't been read. It happens on every vBulletin board I've used.

If you don't do anything on the forum for a certain time period (15-20 minutes I think) then all threads are marked as read. This is not a good thing, since there are some times when I want to read a couple threads and save the rest for later.

Oh. I see, yes. Sorry... was reading it the other way around.

But not due to inactivity per se, alhough I understand what you mean.
What I seem to have witnessed is that it happens if you get logged out from the forums before reading threads that were marked unread on that session. Which is a bummer.

I seem to think, despite the option to always stay logged, we do get disconnected due to inactivity and the cookies or session id silently logs us back...