Google. My wife and I took the granddaughter to the annual model train display at Cincinnati Gas & Electric (Cinergy now) and a few weeks later I was hunting model trains on the internet.
I hit the wrong button.
Gordon
Was searching for CTT website
My son got a train set for Christmas. So Dec 26th I started looking for info on how to build a layout. It was the top hit on google.
Oh, man…
I was either a sophmore or a junior in college, which would make it around 1995-96-ish. I was really, really bored in my programming class room (doing QBasic of all things), and of course all the computers had internet access. I needed something to keep me from nodding off, so I simply typed “www.modelrailroader.com” and was surprised when I actually got to a website.
This was waaaay back when MR.com only had some how-to articles and such. Really, it was more of a dynamic ad for the magazine. However, there was the guestbook-based monthly question by Andy Sperando that people could reply to. It was MR’s first forum, and I posted a couple times on it. I didn’t like it because there was almost no discussion, just people answering the monthly question…no real banter among the participants. I much prefered the newsgroup rec.models.railroad over MR’s website of the era, but I would pop in to read each month’s question.
And then there came the great re-org, when Trains.com was founded, and had one of the worst web forums ever seen. It was slow, each post had to be clicked on to read it, there were few if any usernames in use on the threads (only a time and date stamp), and there were quite a few trolls lurking about. At this time, I still used r.m.r for most all discussion, although I used RR.net as well. And because of the horrible forum software here, I stayed away and posted on Atlas and others.
Then, finally, MR saw the light and re-launched the forum with Snitz Forums. And MR.com has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.
Paul A. Cutler III
Weather Or No Go New Haven