"Edgenet came after Willow left.  There was quite a war back then.
I didn't know anything about what caused it, who was at fault, etc."

 

Yeah...it was a SNAFU for sure, and just about everyone has his (or Her) recollection of what happened, and how it all went down.

 

I'm sure I could ask 100 people what happened back then,and I'd probably get 101 different versions of how it all unfolded.

I even have my own personal "accurate" version of how the events played out,...lol which I'll try to refrain from disclosing here and now...lol.

 

But that part of the subject was beaten to death like a red headed stepchild for years,and to rehash it again would probably just be archaic at this point.

What I will say is, although some members got hurt during the debacle and it's aftermath, I  feel it was a necessary episode in this drama, given the conditions that existed at the time.

 

My Personal feelings of Willow and Grey aside,I too learned a great deal from the PFO. Poser 3 was coming on strong at the time,and trying to get content from Poser to Bryce (Version 4 IIRC) was arduous at best.

But yeah, folks seemed to demonstrate more patience back then, and had the fortitude and commitment to see you through a given task unconditionally.

It was like they really wanted you to "Get IT".

 

Please don't take that to mean that folks don't do that now. It was just "Different" back then. To execute a task, that today, is handled though better software integration, scripts and plug-in's, had to be done by hand, and typically required lengthy explanations, and/or tutorials.

 

But as I mentioned, lot's of people got hurt, and it divided the community for a long while. It seemed to be a "If your not with us...than you are against us" mentality for a while ( A Long While For Some),Most folks could not care less about what was happening, but many felt obligated to choose a side, and decide on a place to hang thier loyalty.

I confess that I fell victim to that "Us Against Them" mindset back then, until I realized how senseless it was. We were all just artists and hobbyist's, fumbling along together, trying to learn a relatively new technology to express ourselves through our art.

In the "Big Picture"there was no reason for me to take that attitude. Oh well...Live-n-Learn...ehh?

 

But Barring all that, I still feel that, although it was a chaotic mess, the change was for the better. All one has to do is look around to see... That many of the sites that branched off because of it...still exist today, and stood the test of time.

 

Sorry for rambling about this trip down memory lane, but having these free resources remain available, is a topic I still seem to hold passion for evidently.

 

 

Tom

“The fact that no one understands you…Doesn’t make you an artist.”