The history behind this site

This site's story begun in 1998. After I have upgraded my computer, from an aging 386 to the latest Pentium 200 MMX, I started to think how could I give "digital life" to my hobby. I had to choose between starting to write about aircraft in Word, or in HTML format.

As at that time I could never hope to have constant access to the Internet, I was seriously thinking about starting to write in Microsoft Word. Besides, I already knew how to edit in Word, while on the other hand I had no idea about HTML, CSS and the rest.

The difference came when I was looking into the Help section of a game I had just installed, called Hexen II. The help section of that game was written in HTML, it opened as a web page in my Internet Explorer 4.0, and I was curious to see how it was done. Soon after, I was already creating my own HTML pages, I learned how to make links, how to handle colors, sizes, images, paragraphs, etc.

I've then made a very long page which included as many aeroplanes and helicopters as I could write about. The page was as long as a million sossages linked together by the sides, and it only had internal links. That was Sorin Aircraft Page 1.0

Soon after, I realized that such a huge page takes a lot of time to load (from my hard drive !!), because of the many pictures and long articles, so I had split them into several pages: a fighter page, a helicopter page, a transport page, a history/war page, etc. That was Sorin Aircraft Pages 2.0. That was also the first version to be published online, in april 1999.

This current site, called Sorin Aircraft Web Sites Network 5.5, has around 200 pages and 800 pictures. All the versions are written by me, alone, in Notepad. No HTML editors have been used.

I write directly in English, but my native language is Romanian. I do not use a dictionary. I am working on my pages especially at night, and I type very fast. Considering all that, spelling mistakes can occur. Please report them, but don't take them too seriously.

In 1999 the site didn't really register a lot of hits, as it was not detected by any search engines. That changed in 2000, when Yahoo, Google, Altavista and all the other search engines have finally started to see my site. The total number of visitors in 1999 was roughly around 2,000.

Sorin Aircraft Web Sites Network 5.5 has registered around 60,000 hits between mid 2000 and march 2006, and continues to register around 500 hits per month. Many of the visitors come to visit again, and some send me an e-mail. Other websites have also linked towards specific pages from here.