Running Links
In the early 1982, John Snelson and Alan Cole attempted to introduce some technology into the Trotters by recording the times on an Apple IIe. Weren't we ambitious ! We had in mind recording the times by putting the Apple gogglebox in the back of John's old Honda Integra hatchback, and keying the Trotters' finishing times "live". Alas, it was all too hard.
The records were produced on an Apple IIe in 1983, the machine boasting a big 64k of RAM and two 5.25" floppy drives; the data was keyed into arguably the most enduring, influential and world-changing piece of application software to emerge in the last half of the20th Century - the original spreadsheet - VisiCalc. A second attempt was made in 1986, again on the Apple IIe, but this time using initially MultiPlan and then Lotus 1-2-3 !
The first website was built by John Snelson in 1994 ... lovingly by hand, in native HTML long before there were web page generators, on a clone DataStar 486 DX50, a very unusual and rare, mother board, with 8 megs of RAM {wow} and a big (in those days) 100 meg hard drive, to preserve history for future generations. The site was hosted at John's own ISP which he owned and operated for many years at Southern Cross Connect (www.southernx.com.au). This was closed down in the Year 2000, a victim of the ludicrous administrative requirements of the new GST. The website was lifted in total, rewritten into MicroSoft FrontPage, and transported to John's own domain (www.snelson.com.au) where it remained until 2008
The old DataStar DX486 has been replaced by several Pentiums, I, II, III and IV and we now have Cable Internet, 100 gigs and networked machines. Yet the Trotters just keep trotting on.
Here we were then in late 2007, many more years had rolled by, and still we had not secured this data for future generations.
Over the long Christmas and New Year break in late December 2007 and early 2008, a big effort was made by Alan Cole, Ian Holmes, John Snelson and Peter Welch to revamp the web site with the establishment of our own domain at www.turramurratrotters.org and transfer the manual records to computer. The results to date can be seen here on this website at The Turramurra Trotters' Tables . God Bless the Indexers.
