Again By Heart

I will be going through the bits and pieces of HitRECord history available through the WayBackMachine and sharing some of the very first community records here as I work through it.

The forum was created on May 10, 2007 and officially launched on May 20, 2007.

People joined right away, and within 5 months after starting, there were already 1,628 forum users who collectively made16,573 posts across 844 topics.

The first forum categories:

The first 50 HitRECorders!

First topic. Sugartown Traders:

I used a Ruby script to extract all the available forum pages from archive.org.

I think there is somewhere around 400 pages of forum posts.

While it's only a portion of the sacred texts, it's all we have left and still a pretty good amount for archeological exploration of the ancient records.

I'll share more from it here in the future.

Woah. Thrilling to see the list of the first 50 from this current vantage point of 11/11/23. I can feel the joyfully giddy discovery vibes circling around your research.

Simplifying things to just a screen name and some text feels quite comforting this morning. I appreciate that head space I inhabited before I looked up to see what my favorite radio personalities like Terry Gross or Art Bell or James Lewis (local DJ) looked like. Were we more thoughtful and kind with each other when our comments were more than three fire emojis? There were paragraphs of words, sentiments, connections. Why do I feel creepy now if I write paragraphs to someone?

See, you got me getting all romantic and nostalgic here, NJ. Although, it doesn't take much.

I dig this groovy forum. Thanks for building it, and thoughtfully reminding us that it's always been there again and again by heart.

- Boxy

“”

Thank you! It was great to read this first reply here. I had a dreadful fear that it was going to just be me talking to myself here.

I love seeing these! I'm glad I found Hitrecord in 2018 and it's good to see how it really started. Amazing that such a creative community came to grow from such a 'simple' forum format.

ah this is so fascinating! Hi guys. Pootling round today and seeing what’s what. <3

-MC

Message boards - I feel like I've gone back in time. This feels a bit strange, but it's good isn't it? Just remember though anything I post here might be able to be read in the year 2525 - maybe????
Old emojis too - it's sooo weird.
Weird is stimulating for the mind.