Monday 25 July 2011

Founder Members

It's always nice when someone rejoins DepList. Today one of our founder members rejoined after an absence of several years, which had me wondering how many of these pioneers we still have on the List. I suspect it's no more than a handful. The membership tends to be pretty constant in terms of numbers, which means that newcomers join at the same rate as people leave. Some of our current members would have been 11 or 12 years old when DepList started life! I'm not even sure when DepList was born. All I remember is that it was launched as a messaging service, called "Deputies", sometime in 1999. We compiled a list of about fifty potential members and invited them to join, and about half of those took up the offer. I made the first version of the website a few months later, and the domain name "DepList.co.uk" was registered in 2000, because "Deputies" was already taken. (What a good thing, as DepList is so much better!). How strange to think that mobile phones were not in common use back then, and the standard way of booking deps was landlines and answering machines!

If you think you are a Founder Member, please let me know using one of the contact forms on the website, so that I can make a note of it.