15 Years of QRZ

I just finished shipping the first batch of the Version 30 QRZ CDROMS and it made me stop and think, gee, it's been 15 years already since the first edition went out.

It was back in 1992 that I bought my first 1/2 inch magnetic tape from the FCC containing the callsign database. We didn't make a CD from that tape but instead made copies on 1/4 inch cartridges. It was just the raw data with no lookup program. The whole thing was setup on Usenet, in the rec.radio.amateur newsgroup.

Six months later, when it was time for an update, I decided that it would be pretty cool to use the hot new CDROM technology. Since the entire database was only about 50 megabytes, I tried asking a prominent CDROM publisher (Walnut Creek CDROM) if they might include it on one of their shareware CD's. They said no, but that they would consider making a separate Amateur Radio CD.

We worked on the new edition for a couple of weeks and in a flash, I though of a name: QRZ. It seemed to fit.

The first edition of about 1000 copies sold out almost immediately. Within 2 years we were selling more than 1000 copies per month. Note that most of the world had not yet heard of thw World Wide Web, and there were no websites to speak of, anywhere.

Around the same time, I started the QRZ dialup bulletin board in Scottsdale, AZ, and it became an instant hit in the local area. We were at 1200 baud and loving it. All of the software was homegrown, and written in C running on SunOS 4.0, on a SparcStation 1 machine in my spare bedroom. I wish I had a picture of it now.

Two years later, the first browser called Mosaic (later to become Netscape, Mozilla, and now Firefox) appeared on the scene. It was a big hit and before long I had made friends with a local internet service provider who had a single 56 kbit line. They let me move my SparcStation 1 into their building and hookup directly to the internet. I wrote an email to Internic and was granted the name QRZ.COM. There were no fees whatsoever for domain names at the time.

Over the years, a lot has happened. Walnut Creek CDROM has long gone out of business and the QRZ CD now sells fewer than 2000 copies per year, thanks to the success of the internet. Our line speed went up to a T1, then two T1's, then a 3mbit segment on the backbone to now, a 10Mbit fulltime backbone connection. Our servers have been upgraded at least half a dozen times. We still run Sun equipment for all of QRZ, however now the main machines are x86 instead of Sparc based.

The CDROM is still a beloved part of QRZ and I'm very proud to say that it's gone to a lot of places that I'll probably never visit including: Antartica, the Mir space station, the ISS, and all 7 continents, and many, many countries around the world. I figure that in total about 200,000 copies are in circulation today. By the way, the Version 1 CDROM is quite rare. I only have a couple of copies myself!

I call the latest edition (V.30) the "white album" because, well, of it's mostly white cover. For some reason, it seems a little more shiny than some of the previous editions, or maybe it's just the gleam in my eye. Either way, I'm still the proud father of those 750 copies. Already, more than 150 of them have found new homes around the world.

I'd also like to thank all of you who've purchased the QRZ CDROM over the years and especially those of you who've tried to collect one of each edition. Each one has helped keep QRZ online, free, and up-to-date over the years. They're still a big part of our annual budget.

Yep, 15 years later we're still going strong and in fact stronger than ever. Since it's the time of year to be thankful, I'd like to take this opportunity to say THANKS to all those around the world who have and continue to make QRZ one of their preferred websites.



Happy Thanksgiving,

-fred AA7BQ