Recovering the Early History of javaBin
The jubileum is coming, and the requests for early facts have been piling up. When did javaBin start? Who was at the founding meeting? How many people came to the first JavaZone? I have been meaning to document this properly for years. The requests finally gave me the push.
The problem is that I used to have all of it. Every meeting announcement, every board document, every version of java.no. It lived on my NAS drives at home. And then those drives died. This was before we had good, free cloud storage — there was no obvious place to put a backup. So the archive was just gone. Years of community history, vanished because of spinning disks and bad luck.
That gap has bothered me for a long time. javaBin was not just another user group. We built something that measurably changed the Norwegian software industry, and the primary sources were sitting in a landfill somewhere.