Since I'm convinced that this site is now the de facto "message board of drag racing", I think it's necessary to clarify some of the points Will made.
Being online didn't always involve the Internet. Before we had web browsers and HTML, there were things called bulletin boards. They had forums just like we have today but everything was text only.
Mike Hollander was the founder of RIS over at CompuServe. At that time, the Racing forum was by far the most active anywhere online. Some of the staffers went so far as to post reports from races they attended. The report showed up on Monday usually, but if we were really lucky the reporter would post each evening if they could find some sort of connection.
And it was always a labor of love - though Hollander received money from CIS for the traffic his forum generated, none of it went to the reporters other than a shirt or two.
Larry Sullivan was the guy who helped me come up to speed, and come to think of it was the first person to gently tell me that typing in all caps wasn't nearly as cool as I thought it was.
I was already racing in PS at the time, and remember volunteering to help Jerry Reynolds at Memphis sometime in the late 1980s. Jerry was another one of the pioneers. It was at that race I met the new guy, a local who was interested in helping cover races. The new guy was Ed Dykes, and no one who ever met Fast Eddie will ever forget him.
Though at one time I was a staffer on CompuServe, I finally gave it up after being frustrated one too many times by Mike Hollander. We had lengthy arguments about this new thing on the horizon - something called the internet. He didn't seem to think it would amount to much and that people would always pay a monthly fee to places like CompuServe.
While RIS was "keeping the faith", others like Jerrod DID have the foresight. NitroMater filled the void and no one had to pay a monthly fee.
I think RIS may even still exist, but when Ed and Larry Sullivan decided to break away to do this newfangled internet thing, the company they set up was FastNews Network.
It was pretty much a perfect organization, those two. Larry was the computer geek and blazed many trails in software design in drag racing. I wish more people recognized what he's done for all of us.
Ed was a salesman by trade, and he and I would have hours-long conversations as he was trying to stay awake driving home from his latest sales call. I can verify he was about as far from a tech-head as you can get, but with his personality and brains he got the job done.
When we first started covering races, the Media Relations manager of NHRA called us "just fans with laptops" to our collective faces. But Larry and Ed hung in there and slowly gained the respect they so richly deserved by being professional, complete, and interesting.
So, here's my congratulations to all the visionairies who took the knocks, wise cracks, and financial hit back in those dark days when most people didn't understand what the net was, and proudly bragged they didn't even know how to push the power button on a computer.
If it wasn't for them, where would all of us drag racing junkies be?
The changes have come at such a swift pace that what was really happening back in the earlier days of interreactional telecommunications now sometimes feels like ancient history, even when the time frame is only one or two decades ago.
Prodigy had a similar, albeit smaller audience forum as CompuServe, with their own volunteer internet racing reporters.
It too was firewalled, as was just about anything that was general public online access. Join a service, pay by the hour for access, and you could peruse the content of that service provider. For a while, I was paying for access to Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, all at the same time. Prior to the firewalled ISP message boards, the internet still existed, but much of it was text only. If you knew how to find it, such things as the UPI (remember them?) raw international news feed was available. It made for interesting reading back in 1984...
Internet usegroups began the initial expansion of the internet beyond firewalled ISP's, at least for the average home computer owner/user. That's where the expansion really started to take off in a global way. Then, the World Wide Web came into being, and web-based information removed the need for local ISP's that had to include long-distance phone charges in their subscription rates. KaBoom! A huge explosion in the availability for every sort of information to be easily accessible to anyone with a computer and a phone line.
The WWW not only changed this medium of communication, it changed the way the world communicates and does business.
I was one of the Prodigy racing reporters way back in the day. I started posting my work on the usegroup Rec Auto Sport Info (after I posted it on Prodigy of course), and that resulted in a surprise or two. After covering a FF2000 event (I was covering all kinds of racing back then), I received an email from the Motorsports Editor at the Indianapolis Star asking me if I was the FF2000 PR guy. I replied I wasn't and that my R.A.S.I. post was just my coverage of the event - the FF2000 PR guy was new and a bit overwhelmed that weekend. She offered me a job at the Star covering open wheel support series events. I was extremely flattered, but I turned down the offer, telling her my true racing passion was drag racing. She then offered me another job as a stringer for the Star covering the NHRA National Event circuit. Again, I was very flattered, but had to turn it down too. I was still going to the drag races out of my own pocket, and at the time really needed the flexibility to continue to choose my travel schedule based on both financial concerns and interference with running with a brick and mortar store.
There had been a bit of competitive relationship between CompuServe and Prodigy in the early days of online drag racing coverage. That was actually sometimes pretty funny. There was sometimes more rivalry being verbally expressed in the press room than there was on the track! While the NHRA came to accept online reporting to be something that was worthy of seat space in the press rooms, they were grumbling about having to give up four of those precious media chairs at each event, and announced that only one service would be given credentials in the near future (if I remember right, it was a one-season advance notice).
Fast Eddie Dykes secured a financial commitment from the best (in my opinion) drag racing sponsor on the planet to provide enough funds to cover the travel expenses of the reporters. That was Manna from Heaven! I was still with Prodigy when Ed finalized the deal. I ran into him at (of all places) the inaugural Las Vegas NASCAR Cup event in the media center. I asked him about the deal, he confirmed it, then he asked me if I wanted to join FastNews. I asked him if I could think about it for a week. No problem was his response. I needed a little time to figure out how to break it to my Prodigy friends that I was going to "jump ship" and go to the races with Ed and Larry and Rick. That was the best decision I've ever made in my entire life.
...and I wasn't "just a fan with a laptop". At least, not in my first year. I hauled my desktop computer around in the back of my station wagon to work the races.
My desire to work in this sport was definitely there, my equipment was just a lot bigger than everyone else's!
Sorry for rambling on so long. And thanks Jerrod for
THE drag racing forum that is a combination of information and interaction on a real name basis.
