This has been discussed before, but I think its time for some history again.
My join date is listed as 16 Jan 2000, but I actually signed up under a different name prior to that.
So when did rendo actually start up ?
Who started it?
**When did products start to be sold?
**I know at the beginning it was pretty much a free place where everyone shared and a lot of stuff was discussed, even with the developers of Poser.

There was PFO. Didn't rendo spring off from that after a bit of a tiff?
What happened to PFO?
**What happened to Dr. Legume?

What other questions can be asked....and hopefully answered?**

Dr. Legume is moderator at Renderotica (I suppose he's the same ol' Doc)

aha ... I've had an account there for a long time but haven't been there for longer than that :)

Quote - Dr. Legume is moderator at Renderotica (I suppose he's the same ol' Doc)

PFO suddenly disappeared without explanation one day about 4 or so years ago

The information at this link might help you some -- no juicy gossip, though  :

http://www.renderosity.com/news.php?viewStory=13105

ah...several questions answered

store opening: 10 May 2000
Site opening: DEC 1998   ...wow....

ok..so I remembered the wayback machine....
here's a link to the Rendo when it was still referenced as Poser Forum Online..
but it was called Renderosity already in Apr 1999, even though the history reference says Oct 1999....although OCT may have been when the PFO reference was dropped.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990428192554/http://www.poserforum.com/

In "Poser years", if it's 2 years old, then it's an antique.  If it's 5 years old, then it's ancient.  If it's 6 years old or older, then it's neolithic -- and the equivalent of cave-wall painting.

BTW - if you're talking 1998 or 1999 -- that's a mystical period of Poser pre-history.  Many legends are told of that time -- some of the better-known myths insisting that there was a Golden Age of the Elder Days prevailing back then.  And as incredible as it sounds -- a few very old people who are still alive & kicking today claim that they actually lived through that long-past epoch (heh - right - tell us another one!).  A few of those venerable ancients hang their heads and talk sadly about the lost primal purity of those glorious olden times........and they mourn over the shining Paradise Lost.

Personally, I don't believe any of it.  Right -- I mean like first of all they expect us to casually accept it when they tell us that they were around back in 1998.  Ha!  And then they go on to tell us that everybody dwelling in that glorious past was motivated by nothing but pure freebie-making altruism & helping-hand love for their fellow Poser Users.

The Golden Light of the Elder Days.  Sure.  Like other myths: it's a myth.  Sounds nice, though.

poser forum was created in early 98 by willow.
jack bought the site in late 98, after which we hadda recreate our user accounts .
tim bought the site a few years later, maybe 2001, when ISTR legume told us all
to go and sign up at jack's new site (referred to above).

Jeez, looking at it now I hadn't realized my userID was so low...

Hey!  You kids get the hell off my lawn!

Well, I remember the Internet when it was primarily text on a monochrome monitor and there were NO ADS! Imagine that!!!!! I also remember things called bulletin boards that I accessed through my blazingly fast 600 baud modem. A guy in our town ran one - he was head of our waste water treatment plant. The name of his BB was "End of the Pipe". I'm not kidding. When you logged in, his server would ask, "Is that really you?" Beat those memories, you old coots!

well...I did have a 300 baud modem, right along with my cassette tape drive, and 48k memory :)
Wish I would have kept my original screen name so I would have an earlier join date ... that way I wouldn;t have to get off the lawn..

Attached Link: http://www.poserforum.net

Hmmm,

I don't know the details of the urban legend, but I was told by a few different people that the missing Rendo period was due to someone hacking and deteling it.

Rendo started as the new home for "The Poser Forum Online". Bandwidth issues existed back then. Bondware wanted a site that could showcase this site software. Willow needed a host.

They have a disagreement. Willow and the others took the site elsewhere, but Bondware kept the concept and renamed the site to Renderosity. Many people left. Many stayed. But in the end, most came back here to Renderosity; myself included.

Bondware and thus Renderosity is owned by Tim Choate. His wife is Tammy Choate. His posts are as rare as the Holy Grail.

In the early days, groups of community members help run Renderosity. Many went  off to found other sites, like Poser Pros, Renderotica. etc. Almost everyone was collectively here at one point in time.

It's all a bit hazy, but I tried to keep it generalized.

Want to see Rendo way back then?? lol

http://web.archive.org/web/19991127182951/http://www.renderosity.com/

here is the index
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.renderosity.com

LOL. I forgot there was an "Adult" forum. :)

WOW! I remember buying Painter 6. I still have the paint can it came in. I was into Bryce back then and downloaded via a modem. It was awful.

I joined up just after the split from PFO when Jack and co ran the site.  There was a very wierd vibe in those days, like there was a secret society or something behind the scenes plotting conspiracies.  Maybe I was just paranoid. 

Scratch that, I wasn't.  I eventually made friends with an insider who filled me in on the inner workings.  It would seem that ALLEGEDLY Jack K. behaved like a thug and scared a lot of people.  I don't know about that, but I can say this...Jack K. was a believer in free speech.

Having no real talent or maturity I used to rant and rave in the forums and make a lot of noise.  There was a war going on, and it seemed like fun to pick sides.  I went by the name "Darth_Logice" back then. 

Some names to remember:

alleriluiauh (masacred spelling, but it was something like that.  She made the first great transmap for P4 Long Curly Hair.)

Radart - Lots of pics with bikini chicks and dinosaurs

Traveller - I'm sure he's still around somewhere.  I loved his morphs.

Ironbear - Still around I'm sure...3dcc?

I wish I could remember more names, back when you used to know people here.  Not that I'm complaining.  Too much familiarity is a real time-drain when I could be playing with Poser.

BTW, I used to hate the idea of the marketplace and just for the record....MY BAD.

-Darth...er WTB

Traveler is over at RDNA now...plus he had that props club thing going..still does, I gues.

I wasn't in the in club, so could never figure out what all the disagreement was about...or maybe I was too busy creating heads in Poser that were just really bad...and my Bryce work was even worse. Actually, its still real bad :)

wow..10 years of real bad.

Traveller is one of the creators and admins at RDNA, along with Sydd, one of the other fossils. And of course Colm... And yes, the ferrous one is at 3DCC, with dropins at Rotica. Then there is late Don Tatro... Diane and Jack and Legume... Mehndi.... Sean Martin.... Daio.... Anton... Dacort... BAT... Kozaburo.... 3D Universe.... And jeez, this is getting to sound like a roomful of old farts talking about 'the good ol' days'.....

If you really want to sound old, talk about "your first PC", LOL! Mine had TWO 5 1/4 floppy drives!!

I just checked out the gallery guidelines from '99. I didn't realise todays rules dated that far back.

1. No depictions of physical arousal.

2. No genital contact with ANY object, other than sitting or clothing.

3. No rape or torture of any living or dead creature.

I guess even then I couldn't show any photos from a Saturday night out in Manchester.

Yeah, I was here (or there) in '98 and everything xenophonz say about then was true. No joke.

BTW I started with Poser 3 and didn't start buying content (aside from V1 and V2RR base figures) until May 2005!

I was here back then & the place was more centered on freebies & helping each other than it is today (with a few very notable exceptions). I remember back when Tim C came along & site went through a heck of a lot of changes which more often than not broke everything & Tim copped a LOT of flak (some deserved, some not). Back then it sometimes took weeks to get something fixed now of course if they break something it's normally fixed within hours or a couple of days at most.

The good old days? perhaps. You could show nipples in your thumbnails back then.

.... creeps in humbly and in awe...

...says:
"Look at all the Old People telling it like it was way back then ! Wow...."

... creeps away....

Quote - If you really want to sound old, talk about "your first PC", LOL! Mine had TWO 5 1/4 floppy drives!!

Mine used a tape cassette for secondary storage, and had 16K of memory. (Apple II, serial number in the 600s)

(in my best wheezing voice) *I remember when the only way you could use Poser was on a crank-turned machine... running uphill... in a blinding snowstorm!

BOTH WAYS!!!*

Ah, the good old days..... :)

My first computer was the Apple Paperweight - it had two disc drives, one of which had to be used just for the operating system disc. And, for some truly weird reason, when you were setting type, you could only set three lines, no more.

But Photoshop 1 was around: around 800k, straight black and white, no grey tones.

What a different world...

LOL, Sinclair's ZX Spectrum here, back in '84 or so

Quote - The good old days? perhaps. You could show nipples in your thumbnails back then.

Without a doubt, that's one of the more.......Zen-like.......characterizations of the "good 'ol days" that I've heard.

I can see, learn, and accomplish a lot more with the site today that I ever could have in 1998 (not to mention accomplish with the underlying software / hardware itself).

All Utopian idealism aside: you can't run a website of this size for free.  You can't even come close.  Even the freebies aren't free: requiring extensive administrative time and bandwidth to deal with.  Good thing that we have an active and healthy commercial element to pay for it all........because otherwise it wouldn't be possible for this entity to exist in its current form -- for us to enjoy.

Here is a scary thing. I am 41 years old and I first learned to code using a keypunch! ForTran on a mainframe. My First PC and my second PC both used household audio cassette machines for storage. I got my internet by going into the library of the nearest university and checking the bulletin board for the phone number of the school modem... there was no password. 300baud and Lynx. 

All my favorite software was written in 1998-99 I think...

W/P -> WriteNow! (350Kb)
Photo editor  -> Colorit! (375Kb)
Painting -> Monet (420Kb)
Drawing with Shape Recognition -> SmartSketch (350Kb)

Did anyone else start doing digital art with Delta Tao Apprentice or Monet? Man I wish I had an old mac with a floppy drive to still run that.

I was there, back in 1998 just before the Poser Forum/Renderosity change over. I was called Dreamspinner back then, and I started out because Thrallord generously gave me his old copy of Poser 3 because he'd bought Poser 4 which had just come out. I also had just gotten Bryce 3 for a steal of $72 because Bryce 4 had just come out on the market.

P.S. I started out my computer life on an Atari computer with a tape drive and using a small TV as my monitor. Then I moved up to an Atari 1040STE (which I still have several of those machines in storage). Still love the Atari platform. I got my first IBM/Win3.1 machine from an Atari dealer who was closing down. Got it and the monitor for two hundred bucks. It's hard drive was so small, it could hardly run Windows 3.1.

AS much as I went kicking and screaming as things were changing around here over the years, I guess I have to agree most were necessary. I'm still not all that keen on the TOS all the time, but the rest makes sense.
And it is very expensive to maintain a site such as this.

BTW..my first system was an Atari 800 with the cassette drive, 51/4 floppy, and 16k ram. I finally upgraded to 2 floppies, 48k ram, and that 300 baud modem. It was a powerhouse ! BUT..it did run a lot of stuff, although most of the graphics were a bit blocky  :)

It is amazing how most of the games looked awesome...
but go back and check one of them out now ... we must have had some wild imaginations

Yeah, that was it, I had an Atari 800. I saved up my money and bought a 5 1/4 floppy drive. It was only one sided at the time. I was a writer and my dealer back then just couldn't imagine how I could possibly fill up two sides of a floppy so he sold me the single sided. Later bought the double sided drive as a refurb. You had to hole punch the floppies in order to flip them over and use them on the other side in the drive. And it made so many errors in saved. Later than that, I got an Atari hard drived. Get this, it was only 80 megs! A hard drive that could hold one gig was some sort of fantasy at that time. Always wanted to upgrade to an Atari Falcon, but that never happened. Now, I've occassionally seen a Falcon on E-bay for around $50. Heh, I probably still should buy one.

LOL I started on Poser 1, but God only knows when I bought the first stuff. I think it was here but not sure.

I've seen old PC-game compilation CD's offering ported titles like Pong, River Raider, Pac-Man, and Frogger.......so you can play Pong on your 64 bit Quad Core machine.  Who needs intensive game graphics and immersive 3D worlds when you can Pong?  :biggrin:

oh...I started out with Poser 1 too...still have it

My first computer was an Amstrad cpc 464 that have a cassete and worls in basic, still is somewhere, my first Pc was a 386 with I think 2G of HD, I don't remember it well, but looking thouse Hd now, weel.... I think I bought Poser, I don't remenber it was ver 1 or 2 in a 3d magazine.

Attached Link: Poser History

Huh..what...I thought I heard someone mention my name...

Oh god.... now you're asking...

Ummm.
I think the earliest I can offer is 2004 these days. The really old P1 stuff is uh... yeah. stares at the recycle bin
Filed.
Yeah.
That's the word I've been looking for.

I just checked my archive. I go back to 2000.

I'm a relative newcomer,  only December of '01 (as nu-be..;)... Long ago enough to remember number ratings instead of stars...;)

Doc Geep has one of his 'tuts' on the history of Poser; has that been mentioned already?..;)

the only thing I have is from P3 forward ..
wonder if P1 will run on current system ? although, P1 man and woman stuff are still in P6 ...
render up something :)

lol. Yes we had no transmapped eyelashes or vrows back then. But loved every minute of it.

Fun stuff.

Ah! THEE days! :) I was PFO back then, and R'osity after the split. Stayed with the PFO and
joined 3DCommune when it started. I bought my first content from Zygote, before DAZ split
from them. I started with Poser 3, Bryce 3, and trueSpace 3. :) Posette was THE female figure,
until Victoria 1 hit the scene. Michael 1 was VERY eagerly welcomed, since the only male to
that point, was Posette's male counterpart, Dork. He was named that for a good reason. Now,
I wonder what happened to Willow and Grey.

Greywolf

Quote - Dr. Legume is moderator at Renderotica (I suppose he's the same ol' Doc)

Oh, c'mon... we feed him occasionally.

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Quote - poser forum was created in early 98 by willow.
jack bought the site in late 98, after which we hadda recreate our user accounts .
tim bought the site a few years later, maybe 2001, when ISTR legume told us all
to go and sign up at jack's new site (referred to above).

That's the short version, but yeah... Willow and Grey founded and ran the critter. Jack K. (who still hangs out at R'otica and allows me to pester the crap outta him a lot) bought it, then all Hell broke loose shortly thereafter. Google for those three names, and you'll discover more than you'd probably ever want to know.

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Quote - Some names to remember:

alleriluiauh (masacred spelling, but it was something like that.  She made the first great transmap for P4 Long Curly Hair.)

Radart - Lots of pics with bikini chicks and dinosaurs

Traveller - I'm sure he's still around somewhere.  I loved his morphs.

Ironbear - Still around I'm sure...3dcc

Radart is at PoserPros still. Traveller is @ RDNA (as mentioned by Dave). Ironbear went on long-term sabbatical (and was a store mgr. at Renderotica and Animotions).

Can't spell her name right either, but I haven't seen her in roughly forever.

Also, for Dale's pile:

Diane (she's still around) runs Renderotica, Mehndi evaporated in 2005 (copyright scandal),  and 3dUniverse (Steve, a.k.a. Dark Whisper) showed up in 2002, I believe - he's still kicking today, just off doing his own thang.

--

Quote - .... creeps in humbly and in awe...

...says:
"Look at all the Old People telling it like it was way back then ! Wow...."

... creeps away....

Oh, pish - they suck. Call the nursing home and inform 'em that some of the inmates ran off again.

--

Hell, I didn't even see Poser until version 4. I started on BSP - later on QOOLE (Quake Object-Oriented Level Editor), and UnrealEd (all of which were about as stable as a cork in a hurricane).

Oldest computers used when brand-new: Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, and Mom's Macintosh (the original "Classic" one).

/P

Here's a circa 2001 New York Times article which mentions many of the websites & names that are appearing in this thread -- along with a number of others:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E1DB163DF935A15754C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Anyone remember the old Atari Pong TV game machine? that was my first taste of computer hardware in 1975.