History of the TIG
From Tigwiki
history of the TIG
In 1992, the thought arose that using the internet for communication betwen colorists and engineers could be effective. This was before the commercial internet, and having been on the net since 1987, when the net consisted mainly of UUCP (unix-to-unix copy) phone polling, I set up a mailinglist using "SmartList", which used shell scripts to create and maintain a mailinglist. This was v. 1.0 of the TIG. It was on a 386 PC running Interactive Unix.
The UUCP connections at that time were to the machine denwa, the machine Celia at Rhythm and Hues, and to bongo; my machine's hostname was xyzoom. The net was small enough at this time that all one needed was a unique machine name. These were all local calls and updated the outgoing and incoming mail every hour. In turn, I provided for these machines ongoing links to other sites that were also local. This was one of the original ideas of the internet, to bounce traffic (mail) between machines that didn't have a .gov or .edu Top Level Domain Name. The only hosts that had direct connections (non-dialup) to the net were at educational institutions and government sites in the US. Luckily a friend Jim at denwa was a student at UCLA and had a direct connection to the net, so my mail via his machine went out very quickly, though to node sites off the "main" net it still took roughly an hour or two to propagate the traffic.
In 1994 the TIG website was born, built containing an interface to the TIG mailinglist. At that time a migration began from Interactive Unix (ISC) to Solaris, which had bought Interactive, in order to incorporate System V features into their Berkeley-oriented OS. Soon thereafter I hosted the first Aaton.com site. All this was taking place at my Hollywood Hills home, on a 56k dialup connection via Earthlink, and this was one of the first permanent, dialup connections with Earthlink. The upstarts at Earthlink were considerate enough to give me a tour of their operation, which was based in Los Feliz (Hollywood) and consisted of 3 servers and an office with about 10 employees, including an engineer Jay, with whom I was to participate in further experiments. Earthlink now is tremendous orders of magnitude larger. (in 1995 or so I was at the maximum speed of earthlink: 56kb per second to the net.) This new web-based TIG started as v. 2.0.
In about 1997, because I'm more a Unix sysadmin than a web designer, I asked Julien Sorel (very closely connected with Aaton) to help me design a new TIG site. He and I went through various iterations and finally came up with something that lasted a couple of years, and was quite ahead of its time. It can still be seen at http://www.colorist.org/tig3/ but is completely inactive, only there for historical reasons. v. 3.x
Over the years, Dave Tosh was instrumental in helping develop the TIG via the wiki and other interfaces.
In 2000 or so I was in transit and Rich Torpey took over the mailiinglist for a few months from his site in New York City; this was crucial to the life of the TIG and for this I am forever grateful. When I returned to LA I reinstated the TIG and changed it from SmartList to GNU Mailman, very superior, except: SmartList allowed a high-level interface to the mailinglist that I was able to program; now with GNU Mailman I had to learn Python.
In 2003 or so, after various experiments with groupware on the TIG (including a few months with TWiKi), I decided to install MediaWiki, which enhanced tremendously the ability of the TIG to allow for user edits and various blog/announcements. Since then it has undergone several upgrades and is in version 4.3 (November 23, 2007). (now 4.5, June 2008; wiki plugins added; new logo, etc.) see DoneLog for information.
In 2004 I was without a host for the TIG and Mike Orton and James Braid of Oktobor graciously offered their bandwidth and a machine to host the TIG. For about one year, James and Mike were saviors for the TIG.
In 2006 I was able to procure, after a system crash, a new host in Los Angeles, on a good connection, to run the TIG and its wiki counterpart. Thus the requests for contributions on the TIG.
In November 2006 I explored every CMS (content management system) existing, to see if there were a system that could work for the TIG better than the wiki we have had (the wiki as well went down for a while due to a heat problem in LA that corrupted the database). I built, installed and configured XOOPS, Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress, and they all were excellent, with perhaps the nod going to Drupal. However the wiki remains (in my humble opinion) the best web-based interface for the TIG, and is "coupled" with the TIG for blogging, editing and user contributions.
If anyone here on the TIG or elsewhere, feels that there is something new and better (running Open Source please) than what we have, please inform me, thank you. As of June 2008 we are currently in v.5.0 of the TIG after upgrading to mediawiki_1.12 with the latest XML parsers and a number of bugs have been addressed. For a recent history of feature additions and bugfixes, see the DoneLog page.
The TIG conference area, which appeared in July 2008, is undergoing re-evaluation as of August 2008.
The group and almost all the wiki have been ported to a new OS and server, much faster than before (perhaps up to 20x more bandwidth) (making it v.6.0) and is now emerging as a streaming site for colorist reels (v.6.1) as the wiki now will allow file uploads in sizes to support streaming. See the TODO log and DoneLog for more information.
--Rob Lingelbach 23:05, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
