History

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History
Unlike most of the site, where we try to be impersonal and impartial, this is mostly the recollections of the people who ran the site, so it may differ in interpretations. Any inaccuracies will be sure to be corrected by the people who remember things better.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... ok, so it wasn't, but it was 1995, and the Internet was in the nascent stages of commercialisation; Internet providers connected up via 128K ISDN links, and offered a bank of a dozen or so 28.8k modems. Sean went to work for one of them as a sysadmin by lying convincingly about his computer skills. They provided hosting for many years and the opportunity for Sean to realise that gothic.net.au was unregistered, that .net.au was free and had no requirements for registration and that he was a bastard who actually had no real interest in running a goth site, but could block other people doing it. Lo, gothic.net.au was born.

Originally, the site was pointed at a redirect to Black Catherine's web site (hi Clio!) for lack of real content and interest in putting any up; however, somewhere along the way various friends and other people close to Sean actually had a need for space and had content that might vaguely be considered appropriate, so limited hosting and web space was made available. There was an IRC #gothic page, for the oz.org network; there was nascent profile space created. And there was the first hissy fit over design when the webmaster role was handed over to someone who managed to break the profiles and pages shortly thereafter because they didn't understand that PHP was a dynamic language.

Around 1999/2000, Sean, Fiona and Nadine actually decided this whole web site thing had potential for being serious, so maybe something should be done about it. After getting side-tracked in relationships, life, and actually earning a living, we came up with a site known and loathed by pretty much everyone - it had profiles, calendars, shops, artwork, poetry and worse... and a metric shitload of work every week to keep it all valid and up to date because most of the people benefiting from the information being out there couldn't even get their dates right on their flyer (Hi David! Congrats on being one of the few to actually go "oops! my fuckup! sorry!")

And we come to 2003... tired, bitter, lonely...ok, not lonely, but definitely tired and bitter, we pack it in after 4 years of trying to keep things running with little gratitude. We most certainly won't say none, several people worked their arse off promoting their events, kept us in the loop, and made us personally welcome in ways beyond any sort of thanks. But overall we decided it wasn't worth our time and shut down the site; we kept all other services like email and hosting going, as they required little effort on our parts.

2007 - A new day dawns, a new hope arises, and new insanity enters the world - people close to Sean insist that they really want to take over the web site stuff, despite being warned. The world has moved on, and only the calendar seems to make sense, as everyone already has their profile on Livejournal and Myspace, and Google makes links a hell of a lot easier than we ever did. Shopping can be managed by Google and Ebay, but not much makes it easy to find where everything is happening of a weekend...

So we're back. Smaller, simpler, and still grumpy at the world. Enjoy.