The History of Steamboats.org (part 1)

Last week, on July 21, Steamboats.org was celebrating its 11th birthday. I've just checked the domain registry entry and it says the domain was registered on July 21, 1997:



Guess what the website looked like shortly after that. It was just a tiny little site, consisting of just a few pages and the design was - from todays perspective - ugly. This is how the site looked like then:



Why did I start the site? There is a fancy (but untrue) version and an honest version of this story. Here is the true story:

While I was still on college, being a journalist I ocassionally was writing travel reportages for some newspapers. We found out about the Delta Queen and had our first cruise on her in 1995, Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. As it happened to most of us, we loved the boat from the first minute and came back for another cruise in 1998. By 1997 I was seriously looking for what to do after college and decided it won't hurt to have some knowledge in building and designing websites - something very new and exciting at that time when most people didn't really know what the Internet was at all.

Building a website is one thing, filling it with sensemaking content is another. So why not just take these pictures I made on the Delta Queen cruise, add some information to it and make a website out of it? That would be good enough to have something to play around with; and at that time I really was mainly thinking of learning web programming skills and not so much of building a website about steamboats.

To very little extend, this is still true as of today - steamboats.org still is a great place for me to learn about new programming technologies and continuously collect experience and skills about running a website. What has changed dramatically since the early days though is that clearly steamboats and all the wonderful people we met through this website are now in the center of my focus today :-)

The year 2001. Soon the site began to grow. In 2001 it looked like this - and you might notice that there already is much more content on it, more or less becoming more now every week:



But the real jump-start for steamboats is connected with something not so wonderful - on October 19, 2001, American Classical Voyages, the parental company of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., filed for chapter 11.

This was when we started the steamboats.org message board to give all the great Delta Queen people as well as her passengers a platform to share information and keep track of each other after DQSC ceased operations and released all employees.

How did steamboats.org develop from here? The story will be continued next week :-)