1970

When was this site founded, because the first post on the USA Pics says it's from 1970​!

I am also questioning when this thread was actually started because trainz was not released in 1970 in fact the internet did not exist until the mid 1980s but all you had was slow 56K dial up

slenderman8888 said:

I am also questioning when this thread was actually started because trainz was not released in 1970 in fact the internet did not exist until the mid 1980s but all you had was slow 56K dial up

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Because back when the forum crash happened. It screwed the sites internal coding up and no one has bothered to fix it mostly because its not a big deal.

trainman7616 said:

Because back when the forum crash happened. It screwed the sites internal coding up and no one has bothered to fix it mostly because its not a big deal.

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Ye ol' Unix epoch time strikes again (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z)!

2001 sometime, iirc. First trainz was released in Dec 2001, and the forums were active before that with various wip shots / videos, and downloadable 'display' models of different locomotives.
Like the others said, the forums crashed (in 2006?) and when they first came back up, the server time was wrong.

Curtis

The crash was Nov 2006. I was only thinking the other day how it seemed the end of the world at the time with all that information lost, but it's been going nearly twice as long now.

The date issue actually occurred some time after that, but the forum software sorts posts by date so those posts made during the glitch went to the top of the first page.

The UK screenshots is a good example - the second post was the first in that thread on the new though good old photo*uckit have trashed the images now.

I heard a rumour that Trainz was originally invented in 1942 by the guys at Bletchley Park to keep themselves amused during long uneventful night-time shifts. The game ran on a Colossus computer, and the results were printed out on punch cards. Multiplayer sessions were transmitted in Morse Code. Needless to say performance was not great.

Mick:hehe:

2995Valliant said:

The crash was Nov 2006

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Heh - yep; look at our start dates, eh?

The date issue actually occurred some time after that, but the forum software sorts posts by date so those posts made during the glitch went to the top of the first page.

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Yeah, you're right. There were some instabilities there for a while until everything got sorted out. There were some fairly toxic 'discussions' back then; it made this TANE complaining seem minor by comparison. Ah, the good old days....

You are so right! TRS2006 was the end of the world, no one should have moved from 2004 and it was all an evil plot by Auran - even the forum crash. Three years later 2009 came out and I sat here reading diatribes (often from the same people) as to how 2006 was the best version there had ever been etc etc.

Mick_Berg said:

I heard a rumour that Trainz was originally invented in 1942 by the guys at Bletchley Park to keep themselves amused during long uneventful night-time shifts. The game ran on a Colossus computer, and the results were printed out on punch cards. Multiplayer sessions were transmitted in Morse Code. Needless to say performance was not great.

Mick:hehe:

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Sounds highly plausible to me, especially the bit about performance. It is said there was a second release planned where they intended to use block bells rather Morse code but it was snapped up as a training simulator by the Longmoor Military Railway and deemed classified thereafter. Apparently many of the drivers for the strategic reserve fleet were trained on it right up until 2000s when the MOD managed to buy MSTS2 from Microsoft.

Mick_Berg said:

I heard a rumour that Trainz was originally invented in 1942 by the guys at Bletchley Park to keep themselves amused during long uneventful night-time shifts. The game ran on a Colossus computer, and the results were printed out on punch cards. Multiplayer sessions were transmitted in Morse Code. Needless to say performance was not great.

Mick:hehe:

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How the heck did programming on those even work?! :/

Mick_Berg said:

I heard a rumour that Trainz was originally invented in 1942 by the guys at Bletchley Park to keep themselves amused during long uneventful night-time shifts. The game ran on a Colossus computer, and the results were printed out on punch cards. Multiplayer sessions were transmitted in Morse Code. Needless to say performance was not great.

Mick:hehe:

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Actually, the bootstrap loader was on paper tape, and then the simulation software was stored on punched cards. A few extra cards at the end of the deck provided the session information, allowing the user some flexibility and control. The results were printed on the teletype printer, such as the one shown here (notice the paper tape reader on the left-hand side):

What really made it outstanding was the ability to mail your punched cards to other users, so that they could have the same simulation experience. This took "trading cards" to a height of popularity completely missed by young folks today. You could exchange decks, add cards (creating multiplayer capability), and even drop the cards from a fourth story window and watch them flutter beautifully to the ground.

Ah, those were the days!

Being serious for a moment, there is a great book about the Colossus, "Colossus - the Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers" by Jack Copeland and many other contributors, including Tommy Flowers, the unsung hero of this whole saga. Information about the original Trainz program is not included as it is still classified.

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Mick