History
The idea for creating Uchronia was first conceived in late February 1991 and was initiated by a request to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf-lovers (now rec.arts.sf.written) for help finding stories in the alternate history genre. Version 1 of the "Usenet Alternate History List" was then posted on April 11, 1991, to rec.arts.sf-lovers. It was essentially a plain text file about 30 kB long and included about 250 items. Much of that first posting was based on information provided by Evelyn Leeper, who continues to post information today.
A new version of the Alternate History List was posted to Usenet once every month or two over the next six years. The first web version was posted in 1995, but for the next two years it remained just a slightly modified copy of the same material that was still being posted to Usenet. In early 1997, the list became Web-only.
Uchronia received its current name late in 1997. At almost the same time it also was converted into a website, which is extracted dynamically from a text database. Although the underlying script has been heavily rewritten since 1997, the user interface of Uchronia has remained basically unchanged since then. As of January 2008, the database was over 1.4 MB in size and included over 2900 entries.
Uchronia also hosts the main website for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Read more about this topic: Uchronia: The Alternate History List
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)