It was the small hours of the morning some 20 years ago today that the sites formerly known as ce320 and SimplyHPC returned to the web as HPC:Factor.

The two sites that merged to become HPC:Factor had been through a crisis, and both sites had been offline for a couple of weeks at this point. In our scramble to resurrect something, I remember pulling several all-nighters to produce a very rough and ready site layout, logo and concept mocked up in DreamWeaver. At launch, the site had no databases, no automation, not even a CMS. It was entirely hand coded (and apart from the core of the forum, it still is), but at least it’s data driven now. It would be many months until HPC:Factor went from static webpage content to seeing its first database brought online in the form of the return of the HCL.

While hpcfactor.com went live on the 7th March 2003, it was with a coming soon test card and the site didn’t open to the public until 10th March – and it would be more than a year until the forums came online. So in the strictest sense, perhaps the 10th of March should be the anniversary of the launch day. Either way, I actually got some sleep in the intervening three days so launch day itself wasn’t a total disaster!

Of course the site in its original names and forms is much older – ce320 would have been 24 this year – but my thanks to you all for sticking around through thick and thin and for deciding that, all these years later, it would be HPC:Factor that would be the last beacon in the darkness for the legacy of CE. Our own little corner of the Internet lost in a sea of technology against which we are long-since forgotten.