I’ve been using Blender for 4 years. Wow.
I was WeirdHat22 at first on the blender.nl forums before switching to WeirdHat. I wish we had an archive of those forums. Although, I probably said lots of dumb things back then that I’d rather be forgotten. 
Be nice wouldn’t it!
http://web.archive.org/web/*sr_871nr_10/http://blender.nl/*
Navigation within the pages usually won’t work so you have to go back out and select another page from the archive server. There’s tons of content here!
I was there, too!
Oh man, it’s 11 users online!..
Sh** timetraveling is possible! tries to find a working private-messaging page…I will tell them about 9/11 and everything! :o
I wish I would have been there to see all those classic flame wars everyone is talking about…from what I saw…macke sounded like a moron…lol…I just remember when he said he was quitting elysiun and stuff…and then a few months after he came back to whine about a pic or something…lol… oh well…
I’m here since NAN closed its doors 
Well there’s some cool stuff there, but I’d much rather have a REAL archive of it, with all the posts, and the search working…
You didn’t miss much, except the cool community journals (made by B@rt!), the flame wars (I remember Macke saying he was going to leave, and he didn’t, but I haven’t heard of him in a while) and, well…that pretty much sums it up. Those were the days…
Hi all,
I was there then ,and now i`m happy to be here 
dale
Yeah of course that would be ideal. I wonder if B@rt saved anything from it.
i was there and even made it into a journal… once
I read the journal! 
Well it’s great that so many of you are still involved in the community.
I was there I am here, I plan on being here for awhile.
Paradox
I was there, I think I joined after Blender was made free(1.8?)…made it twice to the Community Journal!
I’m still around too, although not so much here lately (or anywhere else for that matter) due to circumstances.
I remember I was so shocked to get any replies at all to my first post on the blender.nl forums, and that they were all so positive (it even made it into the CJ), that I didn’t answer at all untill I think at least two weeks later…
Me, shbazjinkens.
Madcow was around too.
I remember first downloading a flavor for Linux/Unix… 1.60 or 1.40? They didn’t have a version for Windows out then. The blender.nl site was solid grey background with the metaball logo that spelled BLENDER… The first animation I saw was TUX sledding down a snow bank.
Here’s an old archive link talking about the C-key around the same time… http://web.archive.org/web/19990508065544/http://www.blender.nl/blender/index.html
I remember when Ton slowly started unveiling the new Blender.nl site… he had “holes” on the old grey website showing the new bright colored site coming through in patches… Each day he made bigger holes to finally unveil the new brightly colored website… I miss the old grey one!!!
I even made a THEME called “Memory Lane” on my Blender Gallery site just for ol times sake… Go here and change the THEME to “Memory Lane”…
I remember chatting with IceMan ‘one on one’ and found out he lives about 2 hours South from me here in Florida. I never did get a chance to hook up with him… His son was learning Blender at the time… I believe his son did some of the tutorials on his site…
My all time favorite Blender animation to this day is “Downinit”… It’s like 50 meg… I have it on one of my Blender CD’s…
Great memories… too bad we can’t have some kind of Blenderhead meetings throughout the US… I know you guys get together overseas, but a user meeting on native soil would be kick ass… coming up with a central location would be nice… like slap dab in the middle of the US… Texas or a State a little farther North…
Well… (lifting a cold mug of beer high in the air) here’s to old times and to new ones… (tipping the mug back as I gulp a cold mouthful down and wipe my lips with my cuff)… AAAAAH… keep on Blending!
______SysAdm
I was lurking around, but I’m not sure I had an account, then… If yes, the login would have been “Baron_M” or something very close. I was middly active on IRC too, but not much.
The first version I recall of Blender is the v1.68… It was my first and only (and still is, apart from POV) 3D package experience. What was the version of Blender just before 1.68? It was the version I started with, I think…
The various tutorials I wrote then are still on http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section3d and one of them even made it into the old blender.nl website…
Ahhh… recalling good ol’ times!
Yep, I remember the message about the forums beeing rebuilt
(at least I think so)…And as far as I can recall…I where around
there then too.
But at that time I was using 3dstudio max mostly and Blender
where just something I peeked into now and then in order
to check upon it…see where it was heading etc. I do that with
a lot of potential software.
I didn’t forsee that I’d be using Blender commercially one day though…
:o
since 1.6 (& I too had a c-key)
damn well i came when the NaN website was still up, but the company had gone down (so the website was only half up)
2.23 days. i was so confused that i only found out that blender was going open source later.
strange times.
i wonder what the community will be saying in the future.
remembering the days when X-Warrior was around (before that unfortunate accident with him making a chainesaw so realistic that it came out of the screen and attecked him), and when elysiun was still called elysiun, and was orange and blue.
Arrrr i can see the memorys forming already.
Alltaken