Message from Slug
I am Chuck Neel, aka Slug.
A brief history of PBase.com
1983 - My parents bought an Apple IIe and I sat in front of it for a few years.
1988 - A friend lent me his 300bps acoustic modem which I used constantly.
1990 - I graduated high school and went to Virginia Tech where they had 19200 modems in the dorm rooms. I found the internet and learned UNIX and rarely went to class because I was too busy playing games and programming things I wanted to.
1997 - Got a job at BDM/TRW and learned how databases work.
1998 - Decided to learn more about UNIX so bought a dual 350Mhz Pentium and installed Linux, registered a domain, learned HTML, and started making miscellaneous web pages.
1999 - Left TRW to work for my dad's civil engineering company which he started in 1986 and which I've watched grow.
Jun-1999 - Following a trip to climb Kilimanjaro where my friend's cheap point-and-shoot camera took better photos than the Canon AE-1 I carried around, I decided to learn more about photography. I bought a Canon EOS A2 and started shooting lots of film. Living near Washington, D.C. I would often wander around the tourist areas looking for anything to practice shooting. I couldn't help noticing thousands of people running around with cameras, and I wondered what happened to all those photos.
Aug-1999 - I decided to put my photos on my website and quickly realized that hand writing HTML and hand making thumbnails was far too much work. I needed some automation. I also needed a way to store titles and captions and dates and technical info. So I learned Perl, figured out how to make it talk to Oracle and Apache, and made PBase.com.
2000 - Moved to North Carolina to form a company with two friends. The company didn't get far but I remained in NC. A job sounded unfun, so I decided to live on burritos and pizza for a while and concentrate on PBase.
2002 - Met Emily who is extra cute and can write Perl. Plus she has a car which is important when we need to get to the ISP to install more servers and disks.
Mar-2004 - In March there were 118million page views and 3.1million unique visitors to PBase.com. PBase.com is currently ranked in the top 500 high traffic sites according to alexa.com
The Future - We will continue to improve PBase to make it a useful resource for photographers and travellers. We will grow the company a little so we'll be faster and more responsive to the people who use PBase.
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