So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block.


* Created 04/16/1998


Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project. I would guess that is the date I originally put the code up on my personal web site for people to download. I remember sending that email to the PHP General mailing list. I told people they could have the code if they would help debug it. Later I officially made a GPL license and then a BSD style license as I became more knowledgeable about the open source and free software world.

So, for kicks we decided to install version 1.6 on the phorum.org site. Keep in mind the release date for that was March 30, 1999. The only hurdles were a default value on an auto increment column in the .sql file, needing register_globals and adding .php3 to be parsed as PHP. That got it up and running. I had hoped to post the URL for fun, but sadly, 5 lines in were sql injection vulnerabilties. Ah, the good ol' days.

Sadly, I don't have my emails from 1998. I lost everything in 2001 due to either a hard drive crash or some shady deal I had with someone hosting the Phorum site at the time. I can't remember. If anyone happens to have UseNet archives or mailing list archives of the PHP General list from April 1998, please let me know. I would love to have that old stuff.