Hi!
This kind of thread make me feel old....
Well since I was around back then, I guess I could answer a few and mix some trivia in there too.
Netepic was born on the old majordomo space marine list around the 16th of January 1997.
The phrase "netepic" was first coined by a member of that list username "Micheal the Liu" (nmae unknown or forgotten by me...
).
A group of us were privy to the soon to be released epic 40k rules through online chat engines (precursors of modern day MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger). We didn't like what we were being told epic 40k was changing into, thus the movement to "preserve" epic second edition.
The idea was put up onto the space marine list about making a group and thus moving 2nd edition forward.
A new idiot.... er.... member of the space marine list Peter Ramos (a.k.a primarch) offered to lead the effort.
As new editions do in gaming, sides sprang up for epi 40k and against. A hostile environment developed on the list. Hardly equitable to have good discussions on 2nd edition.
My last post was in March 1997 to that list. Having no technical expertise to make a similar listserv mailing list, the first netepic mailing list was little more that chain e-mails. The first group had 18-24 poeple. Sadly at one point we actually had preserved whom those people were. Some, like Jyrki are still with us.
Netepic 1.0 started this way. It was hard going. Butwe gt a big break. It changed things forever. Simon Dodds, an aussie, ran the first version of the epicentre. We finally had a real online presence and a wy to reach people. I think you can still find pieces of it in the "way back engine" site.
Version 1.0 debuted in October 1997. It was a simple word doc. We started Incoming e-zine in 1998 and version 2.0 came out although it was never really called that or printed as such.
I forget whether it was 1999 or 2000 when our current esteemed webmaster "netepic" (Tom) took over the Epicentre. In those years we saw 3.0 and the establishment of the yahoo group.
Since then we've seen a couple of major revisions, but none like the one for 5.0, which was huge and took about 2 years.
Hopefully 2008 will be the year netepic gold sees the light of day.
There netepic's "history" in a nutshell.
Primarch
