Urban Exploration History
5th January 2002

I remember when�

I remember when back when I first got into Urban Exploration stuff in 1995. Things were very much different then. There were no mailing lists, no web groups, not much communication between groups at all. I remember after putting my first little UE web site online and spending weeks looking for UE related sites to link to. I found just 4 including mine. 2 in Australia, 1 in Canada, 1 in the USA. They included Ninjalicious�es Infiltration site, which turned up about a month after I put my site up. I�m not saying I was first. I just didn�t find his site till then. I have no idea when his first went online, but it was undoutably one of the first UE sites out there.

Wes Modes site, (http://www.thespoon.com/trainhop/) which is also still online was also one of the first web sites out there, and it inspired me a lot. I love that image of him in the Box car. Ben Heinz and Eric Chein's college tunnel sites were found about a month later. Once again, I have no idea when they first appeared on the Web. I still have a local copy of Eric's now defunct 6 page web site. It was, and still is a great little site

There was hardly even any Internet or World Wide Web. In fact pictures were rare on the Web. Adds, not even heard of. Search engines? Yahoo and Altavista only. Browsers? Mozilla, Netscape and Lynx, a text only browser. Windows? They had just brought out Windows 3.11. I recall the campaign for Windows 3.1 was that the average command takes 7 characters to type. Pointing and clicking with a mouse takes about 1 second. So much faster. : )

My site was a little 2MB job with few photos, a lot of information (much of which has undergone massive change or has been totally re-written) which I wrote up entirely based on my own (then rather limited) experiences. I took photos with a conventional camera, scanned them in on a triple pass scanner and uploaded them into the web site at Fortunecity using the file manager because I did not understand how to use FTP.

How times have changed. I just took my 11,000 th digital picture today. I have my own domain name (3 of them) and use FTP exclusively for web connectivity. The web sites now have a �professional� look and I finally got a search engine. There are some 3,781 digital pictures and 390 HTML files on UrbanExploration.Org alone. This does not include images used on links. There is 3.69 MB of text. But what I have is a small drop in the ocean of what there is out there.

There are hundreds of wonderful and varies UE related Web sites. From little sites to big ones covering all aspects of Urban Exploration. Sites from all over the world.

In 1996 a friend and I had managed to locate 3 draining sites on the Web and we figured, well wouldn�t it be cool if we created a web ring for them? So, with him doing most of the work we created the draining web ring. Eventually due to pressures and other issues we were going to close down the web ring but we handed it over to Ninjalicious at Infiltration instead. This is why the web ring is listed as the �draining � web ring, rather than the UE web ring. Don�t get me wrong here, I�m not trying to big note myself. Ninjalicious is definitely responsible for the great success of the web ring. I�m just reminiscing.

I recall too back when my favorite UE web site was the now off-line Milk Crate Gang web site (which I have a local copy of) I received an email from a man who said he was from Rotterdam and was considering setting up a web site like mine. He asked some advice about what he should put online. I think I said "Everything - the whole lot. I used to be afraid of getting caught but now I just put on everything". Or words to that effect. Peter Kazil has indeed put everything on line. His site is one of my favorites and he constantly inspires me with his news, stories, pictures and site updates.

When once it took me more than a week to locate just 4 UE related sites I now find dozens in seconds. I have trouble keeping my links pages up to date. There are just so many sites out there. All unique, all wonderfully inspiring. Now news groups and mailing lists like there are taken for granted. I still make local copies of all the sites I find every 3 months (if they have changed) as a personal project to see where UE has come from, and where it is going to. I wonder what things will be like in 5 years time?

Just my $76.81 worth.