Happy 10th mate. Here's to many more years on VOGONS.

Happy for you that everything worked out in the end! Here's to 20 years post! 😀

I have been a member of several forums and, to be honest, this is the only one I have been on where there is no toxicity. Its simply a place to share your passion, and spread knowledge. Love it.

Congrats on 10yrs.

Congrats .

See you at 20!

Don't underestimate your own contributions to what you describe in your second last paragraph.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-02-16, 04:43:

This is consistently one of the best places on the internet, and I hope it stays that way. There is such a wealth of knowledge here. It's like the brain trust of vintage computing. It feels like what it must have been like before what the old timers call "eternal September" - and that was before I was even born!

Never change, VOGONS. Unless it's to introduce a "lite" theme so I can load it in 90s browsers.

Yeah, seriously. I'd rather have forums like VOGONS than Discord "servers". Especially given what's been going on with Discord going for a IPO and trying to violate everyones right to privacy with mandatory face and/or govt. issue ID scans.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-02-16, 04:43:

10 years ago today I created this account. I was an overeager 18 year old with an obsession with vintage technology and computer […]
Show full quote

10 years ago today I created this account. I was an overeager 18 year old with an obsession with vintage technology and computers that was somewhat greater than my interest in the university education I was about to receive.

Some of you may remember that I used to post about my struggles socially (with the ladies, of course) and in choosing a career.

I've now been a professional software developer for 7 years after ditching the college idea (I highly recommend turning your obsession into a career if you want to be good at your job), and am very happily married with our first child on the way.

Interestingly, this forum has been one of the few constants in my life. Almost everything has changed in drastic ways for me, but this hobby has remained, and I have enjoyed learning more about it and even developing my skills as a programmer with the help of VOGONS members.

This is consistently one of the best places on the internet, and I hope it stays that way. There is such a wealth of knowledge here. It's like the brain trust of vintage computing. It feels like what it must have been like before what the old timers call "eternal September" - and that was before I was even born!

Never change, VOGONS. Unless it's to introduce a "lite" theme so I can load it in 90s browsers.

Interesting that you are quite young; 18 in 2016 means 8 in 2006 and for average kids back then we might imagine their "nostalgia" would develop around PS2 and PS3, win xp and early 64 bit systems - the kinds of tech they would likely encounter. I guess though it depends on experiences growing up and the paths of interest we follow.

great you're now in job and life you like, when we're very young we often cannot see the steps needed to get to the life we believe we want - and actually looking back we sometimes wonder how we "made it to the other side of the river" and hence can find it hard to give much immediately applicable practical advice to younger people 😀

and yes, vogons is really a great forum, an oasis in a the vast and often empty internet. the best aspects are its open ness (not walled off behind social media) and its ability to maintain a positive culture - testament to most contributors and those who run the forum

Thanks guys.

gerry wrote on 2026-02-16, 09:48:

Interesting that you are quite young; 18 in 2016 means 8 in 2006 and for average kids back then we might imagine their "nostalgia" would develop around PS2 and PS3, win xp and early 64 bit systems - the kinds of tech they would likely encounter. I guess though it depends on experiences growing up and the paths of interest we follow.

Yes, that's because my interest does not really stem from nostalgia at all. I grew up using Windows XP, but always had a fascination with older systems that were much simpler and where programming was closer to the hardware, so that if you write a program you're interacting with the computer itself rather than just OS-level APIs.

I loved using MS-DOS where the computer just does what you tell it to do and doesn't sit there churning the hard drive and "thinking" before giving you a blue screen of death.

In 2006 I was writing programs in MS Quick Basic on a laptop that was a little too new for my dad's old copy of MS-DOS 5.0 to be as useful as it should have been. Sound Blaster compatibility was my nemesis. I longed for something like SBEMU, and trawled the internet constantly for that exact program, never finding it because it didn't exist yet! I did have Windows 3.1 installed as well, and used the PC Speaker PCM driver to play horrible sounding WAV files that I had ripped from CDs on my dad's computer.

I used to get so mad that Windows XP was slower than Windows 98, 3.1, or DOS on the same machine. It didn't make any sense to me. Why would they make it worse on purpose? Not to mention none of my games worked right in XP because the so-called "SB 2.0" compatibility in NTVDM never worked with any program I ever tried it with.

DOS booted in about 2 seconds on my laptop, and I'd have to wait ages for XP to boot on the same machine, and churn the hard drive constantly, using up all of the RAM. What a ripoff!

gerry wrote on 2026-02-16, 09:48:

great you're now in job and life you like, when we're very young we often cannot see the steps needed to get to the life we believe we want - and actually looking back we sometimes wonder how we "made it to the other side of the river" and hence can find it hard to give much immediately applicable practical advice to younger people 😀

This is very true. My friends and I joke about having gotten the "last chopper out of Saigon" with respect to finding wives. It was difficult for all of us and we don't see the landscape getting much better.

I assumed you were older.

So did I, perhaps the picture of the bearded guy has something to do with it.

gerry wrote on 2026-02-16, 09:48:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-02-16, 04:43:

This is consistently one of the best places on the internet, and I hope it stays that way. There is such a wealth of knowledge here. It's like the brain trust of vintage computing. It feels like what it must have been like before what the old timers call "eternal September" - and that was before I was even born!

Never change, VOGONS. Unless it's to introduce a "lite" theme so I can load it in 90s browsers.

and yes, vogons is really a great forum, an oasis in a the vast and often empty internet. the best aspects are its open ness (not walled off behind social media) and its ability to maintain a positive culture - testament to most contributors and those who run the forum

I also at times wonder how that is possible in 2026. We seem to have a critical mass thing going on here.

It is quite the antithesis of the modern day "if something has scrolled by, it is old news." Some epic necroposts here have provided closure to matters more than a decade later, which is something I appreciate when I see it.

The fact that I do not know who owns this thing is perhaps part of the reason it is so great - mostly invisible management of internet communities works best in my experience. The only thing I would do different, is hack viewtopic.php to subtract the timestamps of the current and previous post as the topic is being generated, and output a marker between two posts that cross the necro barrier. This visual feedback should clear up confusion with regards to great time deltas in threads without needing to necessarily lock those threads all the time. It's sometimes sad to wave those goodbye.

40 here, i make a living from this hobbie and i dont see that changing any time soon. What changed its the will to spend time playing games, the time and the energy to do it are not the same anymore.

I just preffer a nap with my cats today (it will happen to you soon)

cheers, for 10 more.

You registrated around a month after me, difference is I didn't even noticed I got my 10 years last month 😁

Nice one @keenmaster, I've always enjoyed your posts.

Congrats on getting married and impending fatherhood - my kids are mid/late teens now and if I could go back and do it all again I absolutely would. Easily the best experience of my life.

Congrats on being here 10 years!

Oh wow, I'm about a month away from 10 years myself.

Yeesh... it feels like just a couple years ago I picked up my IBM PC 5150 and started on my intentional retro computing journey. That was 2015!

Shortly after tinkering with that computer, which far far predated the hardware that I was experienced with, I realized that there was a whole community basically dedicated to the stuff I knew well from the mid-90s to the late 2000s. And here I still am.

I have learned so much, and developed lots of interesting (mostly repair) skills in that span of time. Thanks VOGONS. 🙂

I've only been here for nine years, but always had the impression that keenmaster486 had been here for ages. We are just one year apart!
The profile picture must've made you much older in my mind, now that's funny. 😄

Websites and social media platforms come and go, but vogons has also been a stable community I regularly visit. The moderation here is doing a solid job of keeping the board clean of spam, unneccessary necroing and flamewars. It's really nice here.

Congrats!

schmatzler wrote on Yesterday, 11:28:

The profile picture must've made you much older in my mind, now that's funny. 😄

My idea exactly. 😀

Happy 10 Year Vogons anniversary! 🥳

Wow, I just checked my own profile and apparently I signed up just over 16 years ago myself. Where has the time gone?

Oh well, here's to many more for all of us! 😅