The site itself was a personal project of Alex's a long time ago that has long since taken a life of its own. Eventually he added forums. Alex is an old extremely close friend of mine, so at his request/my own young excitement to work on a big project with my friend, I helped by actively managing the boards for a long time. Clearly I don't do that as much anymore, and we have amazing moderators who pretty much own the place.
If I recall correctly, my join date (roughly 08-09-1998) was roughly when the forums started - probably a few months afterwards actually. In August 2001 we moved over to vBulliten. That's why the oldest users on here all have roughly the same join date...That being said - some of them predate me (many of them are now mods)....At the time we just couldn't handle migrating everyone's info - the conversion to vBulliten was basically a complete forum reset. If you look at the General Discussion archive, you can see the posts that came right after the migration.
Granted I'm not around here as much (I no longer program so....interests change) - but in my experience, the board is a bit 'older' than it used to be. There used to be a bit more slug festing. Some of the social element of the board split in 2002 or '03 and moved to a dedicated social board (making space for new comers). We continued having mod elections and actively tweaking and changing the board probably through 2005 or so....At various points we've also experimented with hidden boards (to get away from the board newbies), contests, article boards, but somewhere along the way it became clear that we were best off leaving well enough alone, and so here we are....
Anyway - I'm sure some of the mods can give you a better history - and the true "social history" of the boards has faded some, but that's the gist of it.
