From reading some of the older posts on this forum anyone can learn how this forum started as a temporary solution in an attempt to get back the domain name of the old weatherforum.net address that was lost due to hosting/registrar that went belly up. That is all well and good and interesting saga to read.
I'm interested in some other aspects of how the forum then grew to be what it is now in respect to discussions regarding the different Weather Station brands. Looking at the following boards on this forum you can find the oldest threads with the following dates:
Davis: Aug 2006
LaCrosse: Nov 2006
Oregon: Sep 2008
Acurite: Aug 2011
Ambient: Dec 2011
Okay so seeing Davis at the inception of this forum is no surprise, shortly followed by LaCrosse a couple months later. What I find rather interesting is that both the Acurite and Ambient boards did not start until mid to late 2011. Surely both Acurite and Ambient had stations prior to 2011....no? Where were Acurite and Ambient discussed prior to 2011 on this forum? I looked in Other Weather Station Hardware and found no evidence of either. It just seems strange. Was board data lost? I do remember reading that both Ambient and Acurite had their own forums by those companies so perhaps most users of those brands did not even venture to even consider wxforum.net. So I think I may have answered my own question. I can only imagine that this forum got more busy when Acurite and Ambient shut down their forums. What year did each of those forums get shut down?
LaCrosse enjoyed some interest from 2006 until around 2013 and then interest fizzled.
It looks like Oregon came into the scene on this forum in 2008 but around 2015 it fizzled too.
What happened around 2013 to 2015 that caused both LaCrosse and Oregon to not be as popular? Was it new stuff from Acurite and Ambient? That is what seems logical based on price point. It does seem as though both LaCrosse and Oregon have not come out with anything new in some years, or if they have then it seems that the competition is stronger.
So question for those of you that have been around since before 2011...where were these brands discussed? I'd like a some history into the various brands and what they were like and their capabilities and what people were doing with them back then. What software supported them...or anything else of interest. How far back were Acurite and Ambient making weather stations?
You know those neat time lines that show version history on Wikipedia for various things. You can for example see these some of which require clicking in order to enlarge and be readable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#/media/File:Timeline_of_web_browsers.svghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_modelshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Microsoft_Windows#/media/File:Windows_Updated_Family_Tree.png...well it would be neat to see some time line of weather stations. Not necessary in graphic form like above but at least to start just in text written out. But lets not leave out weather software too like Cumulus, Meteobridge, Weather-Display, and WeeWx that seem to be popular now but also defunct ones like WUHU, VWS, VVP, and less popular ones like Weathercat and Weathersnoop...etc.
I also find it interesting that there is no Davis Instruments topic on Wikipedia. There is no Acurite either. There is a very small Ambient Weather reference.
Please share if you have any information.