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| From Pylons To Pigeons |
| Join Salter and friends on a trip down Misremembered Lane, as we travel slightly back in time to joyously and blindly celebrate five years of Salter's Travelling Pigeon Loft/The Pylon Cafe! Hurrah! |
| The Early Days of the Internet The internet was invented years ago, using lots of wires, by some bloke whose name I can't remember. Oh, hang on a bit then, I'll look into it a bit more. Right. I'm back. Start again. The internet was first dreamed up in 1962 by the terrifically named J.Licklider who wrote detailed and far-sighted notes envisaging a 'Galactic Network' for the future, in which everyday scrubbers like you or I, could access information, create our own 'spaces' and communicate with each other in real time. It's a shame that we didn't stick with the 'Galactic Network' name, but that's Yuppie Americans for you, never mind. In 1965, two computers were linked together for the very first time and this was a truly historic moment. The original plan had been to have a cracking 2-player game of Stunt Car Racer but sadly, this wouldn't be invented for another 20 years, so all in all, it was a bit useless and nothing much happened. Fast forward about 30 years, and whilst the Internet was now up and running, it was still bloody useless. Nothing much was up there in Cyberspace, everything was painfully slow, the nuddy pictures took ages to come up by which time your cock had gone floppy in your hand, and the whole thing was ridiculously expensive. These days, you can get unlimited access to the net for about £20 a month, but it was a different story back in the early 90's. Spare a thought for BIG FAT GRAHAM'S Sister, who hilariously ran up a bill of THREE FUCKING GRAND in the space of a couple of months, just cos she liked going into chat rooms at night and touching herself. Remarkable. Anyway, the internet continued to be useless and limp until about 2001 when Daniel Lee Salter launched The Pylon Cafe and overnight, the internet changed forever. |
| Pigeon Loft Memories "I remember when this site used to be good, I was there from the fucking begining, when it was all just fields. Now look at it, Doctor Who shit plastered everywhere, the guestbook filled with fucking sci-fi nerds. I tell thi, it were great in the old days, nothing ever went wrong and no one ever nicked owt off each other. You could leave your door unlocked in them days. Now-a-days it's all this happy slapping and ASBOs. I really don't know what happening to society. Bring back National Service I say, get a bit of discipline in them." Alex Sotheran, Wales |
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| 2001 - The Launch of The Pylon Cafe The Pylon Cafe was launched in around July 2001 and was pretty basic to begin with, quite different from the slick, sophisticated, cutting-edge website of today. The site was originally on Freeservers, and the original website address was dannybooze.freeservers.com. Although it was simplistic, there were still lots of things to make and do. There were three big Photo Galleries (all of which took ages to come up), a very basic and short-lived Guestbook which can be found here, and a regularly updated Newsdesk story, a feature which has only very recently returned to the site, after an absence of about four years. In fact, shockingly, back then the site was updated every single week with a weekly editorial on the front page, as well as a different Celebrity Guest making an appearance each week, ranging from Morrissey to Rolf Harris. Imagine that nowadays, eh viewers? This was obviously back in the days when Salter could be bothered. A second very early Guestbook can be found here, although the beautiful starry background has since been lost forever somewhere in The Galactic Network. |
| 2002 - Moving House To Geocities One fine day, at the beginning of 2002, Salter logged into Freeservers to do another eagerly anticipated update on The Pylon Cafe. He got quite excited when the Freeservers Site announced that new innovative features were on the way for all Freeservers Webmasters. Within seconds, Salter was already planning ground-breaking new ideas for The Pylon Cafe which would change the life of internet users forever and ever. When he got round to reading the small print though, Salter spat out his mouthful of Tennant's Super Strength Lager in disgust. (Mind you, that stuff was fucking awful.) The truth of the matter was that Freeservers were taking away nearly all the site editing facilities for their 'free' users in a bid to get them to pay for a new premium package. Which meant that Salter would be unable to update the site ever again unless he paid FREEservers for the privilige. FUCKING FREEservers! Unbelievable. Salter briefly considered closing the site down and fucking the whole thing off. But beer-fuelled determination shone through, and in the end Salter moved The Pylon Cafe to a new host, Yahoo Geocities, where it remains to this day. Despite all this upheaval and turmoil, 2002 was a pretty quiet year for the website. Salter was already clearly bored to tears of the whole thing and updates were unheard of. For several months, the website was pretty much 'empty' with nothing on it all except for a nice picture on the front page and a link to The Forum. However, The Forum had now grown into something special, thanks in part to a new look and a new separate host at Bravenet - again, where it remains to this day (despite attempts by Salter to move it, which don't go down well with the stuck-in-their-ways Forum users.) This was the year when the Forum really took off and really became the most important part of the website. And it means Salter doesn't have to update the site very often, because in a way everyone else is updating the site themselves. People Power, you see. Not just laziness. |
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