How did you find The Cellar???
 

How did you come across the cellar???

I found the cellar on i-am-bored.com

How did you come across the cellar?
 

I found it via a link while checking out Photoshop pictures on Worth1000.com.

I think that you'll find most of us came into the Cellar for, from, through, because of, the "Image of The Day". I checked out the image, everyday for months, before I started looking around. :)

i found it listed under links at :http://www.youthink.com/forums.asp?action=threads&ct=6

How I found the Cellar
 

A friend of mine, who post regularly, introduced me to the Cellar.

I found the cellar through a link from another bulletin board which, frankly, has got rather boring. I prefer it here.:beer:

When this version of Cellar came to life in early 2001, Undertoad announced it on the phl.media newsgroup (as the Cellar was originally a Philadelphia-based BBS). Been here ever since, more or less.

From: Tony Shepps (toad@xxx.xxx)
Subject: The Cellar mk V now online
This is the only article in this thread
View: Original Format
Newsgroups: phl.internet, phl.media
Date: 2001-01-17 20:08:03 PST

The Cellar is now online in yet another incarnation. Having lived as a local BBS, as the first public access the net news and email in Philly, as a telnettable BBS, and as a Javascript-based messaging system, it now starts its fifth life as a web-based forum.

Several users have followed it since 1990, when it grew out of the local messaging BBS scene. It held get-togethers that became highly popular and even spawned a marriage. Hundreds of users got their first email addresses on the Cellar. It was the subject of a chapter in an early book on the Internet.

Now it lives on as a friendly, literate community. There's no business plan here, no corporate interest, nothing but people who talk about...well, almost anything.

For those who like this sort of thing, feel free to stop by.

The Cellar http://www.cellar.org

I was bored on New Year's Eve, looking specifically for an online community.

Ya'll can blame BrianR for my dubious presence here.

he told me I'd meet fun, normal, people...

(I'm agreeing with the fun and the people part..normal - well, the jury's still out on that one!)

i was led here by my god. it was ordained.

I was led here by the devil. He posted an ad for the celler on a slow day on another bulletin board I frequent.

i was planning a holiday with my ex, we were going on a weekender to the hunter valley vineyards and i was looking for this place called "the cellar wineries" and the search engine came up with this place when i typed in:

" the cellar, hotel, cofee shop"

i had heard about online communites before but never encountered one, so i took a look around.

The weekend went horribly at the wineries and we no longer speak to each other.. but now im a regular cellar addict.. so lucky you!


:king:

hmm.
 

I stumbled across the cellar whilst looking for the bodies I had buried earlier..uh...oops.. did I say that out loud? no, really a friend turned me on to Idleworm.com.. and somehow I ended up here.. oh yeah! the picture of the camel spider.. YEESH! that will be forever imbeded in the 'ol brain pan..

Am I the only one that found it through one of tony's slashdot postings?

This was a few years ago now, not sure if he still posts.

y'all can thank Nothing But Net.....:cool:

I came here to see Image Of The Day. Don't remember if it was Fark or BoingBoing that pointed me to IOD.

I quit Fark over a year ago. Too addictive, and too stupid. BoingBoing is still good, but the Cellar has better comments/discussion than any on-line community I've seen.

I've been around in one incarnation or another since the dialup days (version III IIRC)

One day I was talking to an old friend and was informed that the Cellar had gone online and here I am!

Brian

I was also a BBS user from back in the early to mid-90s. I found the current incarnation after I was futzing around with the Internet Archive wayback machine, and I put in cellar.org and here we are.

I wanted to see what a "BBS" actually was. I had never bothered looking at them when they were around ( are they still?) and searched "bbs celalr" to see if i could find anything.

does anyone remember this?

But what posessed you to use "cellar" (or "celalr"??) as search term?

Are they still around? I personally don't know of any. (Unlike The Cellar, a lot of the small ones died when there was a disk crash and the sysop had no backups, or the sysop's parents made him move out and get a job, etc. etc. And several of the big ones that survived became ISPs or were slurped up by ISPs.) But given the affection of some people for older technology, I'd be suprised if there weren't a few BBSes of some kind floating around out there.

satan?

no, actually the assumption( context of your reply makes me think it was incorrect) that it was also called the cellar when it was a bbs.

My parole officer told me about it and makes me come here.

Brian Siano...used to see him on the ng's a lot...

Oh, never mind... I thought you meant that's how you found the site in the first place.

IOTD , i found my self on the same board more than once , looked around liked what i saw , lurked for a couple of weeks then i found a discussion that i wanted to jump into and signed up . The cellar is a daily read now .

member since the before-time (dialup days).

And yes, I remember Brian Siano. (never met, often read)

Through the Image of the Day. That was a couple of years ago, I think. My memory is notoriously bad (Think absent-minded professor type) so I don't remember what put me on to the IOTD.

Last year I started looking around the rest of the site and decided to stop lurking and join.

i found the cellar bland, redundant, oft-repeating, and tasteless.

-sm

Those are some of the same reasons I liked it, too.

I tripped on this site as I was lookng at the picture of the day. (It was Good Friday, 04, and the picture was over the phillipine crucifixions.)

I found this site because of my Husband. He would talk about something he had read on the cellar, and a few times he said he had posted something about me. He sent me the link so I could read what he said, and after lurking for several months I saw a subject I just had to respond to so I joined.

I think Alan said at one point that he found the cellar because of the IOTD.

Edit: Stupid typos

what the hell is a bbs? i'm confused, help.

I am taking a wild stab in the dark, but I think it stands for Binary Beta System.

I don't really know what it stands for, I am just guessing.

I opened a door which I thought led to a bathroom, and fell down these fucking stairs!

A BBS is a Bulletin Board System.

You younger folks are used to the Internet... more or less, every computer can talk to every other computer. Back in the olden days, however, most people with modems dialed up to specific computer systems, and those systems didn't talk to each other. For example, Compuserve was one of the earliest and biggest ones. You could chat, read message boards, and download files (the actual display of pictures was heavily limited by available technology). So you could dial up and use Compuserve, but that was it--Compuserve didn't interact with Delphi or Genie or any of the other online services.

A BBS was basically a smaller version of that. It was usually run by a single person (the "sysop") on a single computer. Many of them only had one telephone line, so only one person could dial in at once. Successful BBSs would usually end up with more lines, and some of them even made money. (Primarily, I'm guessing, the ones that let subscribers download naughty pictures.)

In the heyday of BBS culture (late 1980s, say, into the early 1990s), listings of BBSs in the Philadelphia metro area took several pages.

BBS = Bulletin Board System

In the olden days you'd use your modem to dial directly to the phone number of the remote computer. You'd connect to it and leave messages on it. Then other people would call the system with their modems, read your messages, and leave their own.

Most systems only had one phone line so when someone was on, you'd get a busy signal. The Cellar was revolutionary for its day because Scott and I developed it on Xenix - the first version of Unix for PCs - and so it had the native ability to support more than one modem, and thus, more than one user at a time. At its peak it had 7 phone lines dedicated to it.

Wasn't it a rather expensive way to have seven phone-lines? I mean were there no charges?

It was very expensive, but still only about 10% of the cost of my current setup.

so now it's very very very very very very very very very very expensive?

I enjoy the Cellar. Thanks for hosting it. Seriously.

Yup it is that expensive but to be fair, I have managed to recoup it through my business doings.

(Which I should be doings now instead of chatting)

There is a PayPal Icon at the bottom of the main page.:)

I stumbled on the Cellar, using the, ''more arse than class'' technique, when I typed the word ''image'' into Google .. looking for something completely different. Porn, probably ..

Without Google, I would have never discovered a whole new hidden underworld of freaks who inhabit the Internet BB's .. I hope I never meet any of you in the street .. :D

Actually.. I have met a fella, via a tractor BB, from NY state, who insisted on coming all the way to the most remote city in Australia to visit me in person .. he was a real nice guy, as was his lady, and we hit it off fabulously, for the whole 2 days he allowed here .. :)

I was amazed, he wasn't the classic, arrogant, brash, overburdened-with-money, know-it-all, American tourist we have been taught to recognise .. I was stunned to find, he was actually quite normal .. :D :D

Don't make the mistake of judging a whole group by one person.
Most of us are; :haha:

What, if I may ask, is a tractor BB? Is that a tractor beam that attracts the opposite sex, like in Star Trek? A farm implement? A Daisy BB gun?

K now thats funny.:D

I was sent a link to here by a gaming friend. And I had no idea til I read this thread that undertoad was to blame :P for this place.

That's how it's spose to be

It's more kinda like he's responsible, we are to blame ...

*nods sagely* I see yes, thats an interesting distinction

A tractor BB is for those strange people who have an obsession with tractors .. mostly old ones .. they invite some of the freakiest people around .. :D

Here's some ...

www.acmoc.org/Index.htm Antique Caterpillar crawlers ..
www.redpowermagazine.com International Farm tractors mostly ..
www.ibdozing.com Assorted construction equipment ..
www.allischalmers.com Allis-Chalmers wheeltractors and crawlers ..
www.ytmag.com Yesterdays Tractors .. all sorts of old farm tractors ..

DiscusWare make a really good BB program that you can purchase, set up yourself, and modify to your own tastes .. it's simple to use and I like it.
Here's the DiscusWare site with links to thousands of Discus BB's.

www.discusware.com

75,000 in total, according to them .. although I suspect a lot are poorly frequented.
The main users seem to be car freaks, tractor freak, boat freaks, bike freaks, with a smattering of other hobbies thrown in. Even found a Discus wife-swapping BB .. now THAT was interesting! .. :D

Dunno what advantage there is in wife-swapping, though .. unless you swapped a so-so wife, for a good tractor .. ;)

Someone's blog led me to an IOTD. I think it was the one with lots of storage crates in Korea.

Uh, I did a google search for "castrated cat" or similar and came up with your image discussion of a sacrificial pig... yeah...

I think I stumbled over one of Tony's posts on /. and ended up here.

Has the cellar ever been /.? This would probably kill your server, eh?

Tony, why exactly is it so expensive?

I realize what some of the costs are, but assume you have a T1 in place anyhow for business. As for bandwidth the cellar isn't all that graphical really and although it seems like there are loads of people here it's really small potatoes in terms of data flowing.

And if vBulletin wasn't free, it must have been a one time purchase long time paid for? Then you've got domain reg which shouldn't be more than $10 a year or so, no hosting fees because you have your own server. Is it a dedicated server? And if it is it wouldn't exactly have to be cutting edge.

I'm not trying to bust your chops here but am curious how something like this could cost so much? Now if you're including your TIME spent dealing with us crybabies, that's another matter.

I don't recall it ever being /.ed, but it's definitely been Farked.

It is a "sunk cost" of sorts a lot of the time, but it hasn't always been, and won't always be.

The very worst of it was circa 1994 when I bought it from its co-founder to keep it alive. The payments kept me in hock for a year as did the phone lines for 7 modems.

It can take a tenth of the T1 on really good days, all during the peak hours (weekday afternoons) and I am reselling that bandwidth to real, paying clients, so it doesn't have zero impact. More importantly, when there was filesystem corruption the other week it was located in Cellar files and impacted my other clients severely. It also attracts hacker/cracker attention (I was DOSsed once) and occasionally, undue traffic which impacts the whole business. So my best bet in the long run would be to isolate it from the rest of my activity, but that would co$t much more and have a huge time impact.

When there is extra money in it I send it to Google for advertising (as right now - do a search on "intelligent people" or "interesting pictures" - don't click on the ad or it will cost us $0.10) or Fark classifieds or anything else that appears to truly bring people.

As for /.ing, it has never been, but /.ing is not what it used to be since /. is not what it used to be.

As for vBulletin I bought an "owned" license in the beginning but will be "re-upping" soon and buying their "no copyright notice required" version, in order to graduate to version 3, and that will cost $150 all told. There are often these sorts of expenses and if it weren't for the charity of one particular Cellarite, whom I forget if they want to be anonymous about it, donations would cover probably half of them.

That was pre-me and NBN.:D

Roughly how much bandwidth does cellar burn through a month?

I've never done the programming/math to work that out, I just watch my MRTG graphs carefully.

a day? Are we talking 1Tb? 100G 500G 10G? Ballpark?