I just noticed that the first member of RYPN, "rypnorg" was created on August 10, 2004. That means that our forum has just turned 17 years old. Another interesting note is that Facebook itself is only six months older, having been created in February, 2004.

Useless facts, but I thought you all might find it interesting.

While I join you in celebrating RyPN's birthday, if you look at the articles index, the earliest one, by Dave Lathrop, is dated 2003, and the copyright at the bottom dates back to 1998. I think Hume started working on RyPN well before 2004, because I know that he had posted something about Westfield Plantation RR before Y2K, and I believe it was on INTERCHANGE.

Now that I think about it, the first three articles I did for RyPN have all vanished some time ago, but I know that they were published before February 2002, because people from all over the world who had seen them approached me when I was working for Ferrovias Guatemala, asking if I was the guest of honor in the killer bee attack which was described in the third article "There is No Plan B".

Everything that has ever been on the web is still out there somewhere, including the answer to this... But what the Hell --- Happy Birthday RyPN, whenever it really is, and THANK YOU Hume Kading !!! The website you cooked up is still doing a lot of good for some fine folks, at least.

Earliest archived incarnation. December 1998.
http://web.archive.org/web/199812022224 ... .rypn.org/

Well that is interesting. Older than I thought! I guess its been 17 continuous years on the the platform that we are using now.

WAY before sitonmyfacebook...