Today – or more exactly, at some point this evening UK time – marks the 20th anniversary of this site being known as HPC:Factor.

After a week or so having vanished from your screens, it was clear that it would not be possible for this sites predecessors ce320 (with a focusing on the legacy H/PC community) and Simply HPC (with its focus on current H/PC technology) to be able to return to your screens.

So it was that during the course of one Friday 20 years ago that the founders had a fairly quick braining storming session over MSN Messenger, I came up with the name, Sean registered the domain, Insurgent found an old laptop in a drawer and threw Windows 2000 Server onto it and I squirrelled into the small hours of Saturday creating the graphics as well as a launch page - including a very quick logo that remains the basis of the current logo even to this day.

Not much of that site survives on The Wayback Machine, with the earliest capture being from 17th April 2003 – but you can see it was there and very bare compared to the site once it became established.
View: HPC:Factor on the Wayback Machine (17th April 2003)

You can even still see all of those old news articles which are still present here on hpcfactor.com; proof that I never delete anything!

The forums did not arrive until 2004 after which the site shifted from a reviews site into a community hub and in all truth, HPC:Factor came into its own stride after the launch of version 2.0 in February 2006. An event that I remember fondly because of the response that it got from the more established mainstream tech press, with several well-known tech hubs running news of our rebrand.

It was sad to lose ce320 at the time, however I know that ce320 could never have become the community that HPC:Factor would become. So to the few of you who have been here with me since the beginning and to everyone else who joined us in the 20 years in between. Thanks for sticking with us through thick and thin. Thanks for all of your support over those 20 years as well as during my 2.5 years running ce320 that preceded it.

Hopefully we can keep going for a few more years yet!