WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

The history of WetLeather is rooted in the history of GPNDG and owes much to the Denizens of Doom "motorcycle club".

That first Gather was a great success, with about 30 attendees from as far away as Chicago, including several of our friends from the People's Republic of California. Shortly after that first Gather, there was much rejoicing and story-telling and bench-racing on the GPNDG mailing list from attendees and envious non-attendees. Some folks who were on the mailing list only for directions and announcements were not happy with the growing mail volume.

Meanwhile, Carl Paukstis had been thinking about starting a list server for a couple of work-related purposes. This "problem" with the GPNDG mailing list gave him the incentive to go ahead and get some code ported. On October 15, 1992 H Marc Lewis posted the very first "real" WetLeather message. This was followed closely by Bill Johns' rebuttal, and Bill became da Pope of WetLeather - a new tradition had begun.

WetLeather originally ran on frigg.isc-br.com, at the time a 12Mhz 68020 running an obscure real-time Unix workalike called D-nix in 8Mb of RAM and 200Mb of disk space. The references in the original FAQ to frigg and other Old Norse personages trace back to this origin. In 1993, "frigg" became a CNAME aliased to "mom", and the list moved to a 3-CPU 80486 running SysVr4 with more disk space and better network bandwidth.

During 1993, WetLeather passed 100 subscribers and averaged nearly 1000 messages per month. The first subscribers from aol.com and compuserve.com were welcomed, and the second Gather was held, competently BOSSed by Dave Karikas at another fabulous site in the Cascades.

In 1994, WetLeather grew a WWW homepage. Terry and Laurel Powell were such great BOSSes for the third Gather that we all demanded they do it again for 1995.

At the begining of 1996, the handwriting was on the wall. The free-wheeling days of running Internet servers on our employers' computers and network connections were drawing to a close as the "real world" began to discover the Internet. H Marc Lewis founded micapeak.com, bought the very first "legitimate" server, and made a deal for co-location with a local ISP to assure a long-term home for our half-dozen mailing lists and few web pages. Marc has paid the bills with his own money ever since, as his personal contribution to the Internet motorcycling community. Every year in January/February, he opens the opportunity for people to donate to the cause if micapeak brings them happiness and they feel moved to do so.

Since then, WetLeather has been part of the ever-growing micapeak.com family.