Since funvill challenged me to answer, and I’ve been around a long time,
here is my collection of how I came to VHS, and some of my early history
with it.
Before The Bunker,
Before 45W top floor,
Before 45W 2nd floor,
was us making use of space at The Hackery…
Set the date back to September 2008.
The venue is one of the little theatres on Granville Island, as part of
BarCamp 2008.
infil00p gave a talk on hackerspaces, and pitched the idea of a
hackspace in Vancouver; he’d recently been to Germany and see their
awesome spaces.
I think a month or two month after that, I dropped into the open-night,
upstairs at the Emma’s Hackery (later The Hackery, back when Free Geek
and The Hackery were mostly still the same organization).
I think I brought a pack of beer, and enjoyed discussing many things
that evening.
Luke’s VanTrash (now reCollect, our successful decelerated startup) was
brand new then. It helped me remember my trash day far more regularly.
See pg 65 of “Hackerspaces@The Beginning” [1] some of the few photos I
know of our temporary first space; also to see how some of our founding
members have changed in their looks (hint: we have a lot less hair).
I’ve been hosting the mailing lists and website since approximately
October 2009. infil00p hosted them before me, but was moving his stuff
to the cloud, and we didn’t want the lists and site to be in the US.
My co-located server (speedracer) has always been in the Lower Mainland,
so it was ideal.
Prior to 2011, my dues were hosting our website & lists on that server.
It’s the same one I hope to decommission soon (I built it in early
2007). Colo fees have more than doubled in that time, over $200/month
now, and the hardware isn’t getting newer (the IPMI card failed
mid-2013, so emergency management requires visiting it now). I haven’t
had any paying clients to even partially offload the costs for more than
a year either.
According to my Paypal history, I’ve also been paying with Paypal since
May 2011, to the money@vanhack.ca address; I know before that I was
paying some cash, but I think there was a while we used the Hackery’s
account too; before that, but as I note most of my due were in via that
server.
In the early years, there were a lot more group purchases for fun
stuff, all above and beyond our membership dues, and I kicked in for all
of these:
- USRP v1
- Our first 3D printer
- RFID dongles (the workshop I did).
- Laser Cutter
Funnily, I’ve never gone and done our laser training, or printed
anything on any of our 3D printers. They were just cool to have around,
and I thought I’d have free time ™ to use them.
[1] Hackerspaces@The Beginning | PDF | Hacker Culture | Computing