...the first time I saw posts on the Rostra bulletin board. It was in 1995 and we had had an exhausting development cycle getting the first chapter of SPQR online at Time Warner. As difficult as it was to research and model the area of the Roman Forum, render the 300 still images on the high-end SGI animation machine (but each image still took hours to render!), code all the hyperlinking and artifact collecting, write all the journal entry of the characters, this was all easy compared to trying to understand what it meant for the players to be able to communicate with each other and with us.

It is hard to recall a world without boards, blogs and instant messaging - but with the birth of the first board, the world was suddenly different. The ability to converse with total strangers who shared your interest was completely new, untested. There were no examples of how to facilitate such an environment. There had been the WELL in San Francisco, but that was on a local dial up service and was text only. Also, the WELL was not about any special topic of interest for people to bond over.

As we started AS, we experienced a lot of "forming and storming." People did not know how to engage such a world of contact with strangers. At AS and on boards at other websites, there was a lot of experimentation with protocols and rules of conduct. Eventually AS settled into a mode of "norming and performing."

Ten years later, AW is a wonderful, healthy, and robust online community. One of the oldest and among the best. Many books and articles on both online communities and ancient history have referenced AS/AW over the years. We should all be proud of this place!

To think that, despite bugs and next features, this community is strong and self-sustaining. There is no technical, social, or business reason for AW not to continue for decades to come. In one hundred years (dare I say 1000!) even today's Novices will be respected as the "ancient ones" whose words will still be there in the database, echoing across time to future generations of AWers. It would be as though now you could hit the previous button on the DailyIndex all the way back to 1907, or, in the thousand-year scenario, 1007.

It is exciting to think of what the next ten, twenty, hundred, or even thousand years might bring!