I came here from rec.knives back at the beginning.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate the simple fact that the knife community has grown and rallied and solidified and formalized considerably in the past fifteen years. Those of you who have been around that long can remember, probably, wondering if there were others like you in the world, others who shared an interest in -- of all things -- knives? Maybe you went to a show once a year and spent a day or two immersed in knives. Maybe one of the monthly magazines brought you a few hours a month and a few dozen pictures, a few thousand words. But, for most knife-enthusiasts, that was it.
Enter the Internet.
And then there was this thing called USENET. Usenet was the precursor of social media, of discussion forums, indeed, of user-built content on the Internet. It was an amazing conception. I was finally shut down just a couple of years ago. You can still access all of the old archives. There were, eventually, Usenet groups for just about everything. It was divided up into sort of broad areas and then by specific topics. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. It was immortalized in a country music song written by an engineer living in Nashville, "She was the e-mail female and I met her on talk dot bizarre." Yes, talk.bizarre, one of the many, many usenet groups. (I wrote the song, "E-mail Female," by the way, and shopped it around but couldn't find a taker. I did sell "Credit Card Cowboy," though, but it was never produced. And thus ended my career as a major Nashville songwriter. Stick to engineering.) Meanwhile, back on-topic, one of the many groups was a group for knife enthusiasts, part of the recreation category, rec.knives.
Well, when the concept of web-based forums started to pick up steam (usenet was totally text-based and took a bit of getting used to, not entirely obvious to use, but such was the entire Internet at the time), there was a forum started called recdotknives.com. It didn't last long and was quickly replaced by this thing called bladeforums.com and I made the switch.
This whole "online thing" was amazing for knife enthusiasts and for the knife community as a whole. Suddenly, there thousands of words and several pictures per day!, not per-month. Suddenly, the knife community was not something we wondered about; it was something that came into our lives every day. Suddenly, the people we saw maybe once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime, the people who shared our interests and our passions, were on our screens everyday. Imagine being able to talk about and think about and share about knives with like-minded people not once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime, but every day! And suddenly the people who were doing the talking were not just the few folks fortunate enough to be hired by the knife magazines, but it was everyone contributing what they knew. It was explosive. It was revolutionary.
And while rec.knives was the genesis, no doubt, it is equally without doubt that bladeforums.com was truly the epicenter of the explosion. This place fundamentally changed the knife community.
And from that change came an explosion of new shows, came the growth of existing shows, came an explosion of knife-related websites, came an explosion of new dealers and retailers, came an explosion of custom makers, came a rapidly-expanding expectation of custom knives and an explosion of new designs and materials and methods, came an explosion of knife manufacturers, came an explosion of factory knives, came a rapidly-expanding expectation of the quality of factory knives, AND -- and this is really important -- came two organizations, AKTI and KnifeRights. And from those two organizations are coming something I thought I would never in my life see: legal reform of knife-related legislation. It's unbelievable what has happened in the last 15 or so years.
And most of that happened here. This place has been the epicenter of the knife renaissance.
Having this place, a dominate online site to unite the community, has been of critical importance to the knife community and the knife itself. The community owes a huge debt to this place.
And so now, gentlemen -- and ladies -- with my Martini in-hand, I ask you to join me as I offer a toast: To Bladeforums and to Spark. Thanks for all that you have done and here's to a bright future.
. So far? Worth every cent! 