Tsuba site, RIP

Recently I’ve heard a time or twenty that my old tsuba site is offline. Back in the mid ’90’s there was a thing called a “personal home page” that came for “free” with your dial-up account. For better or worse, that’s where the ancient technology behind Tsuba has been creaking on for all these years. If there was too much traffic the site would be shut down until the meter ticked over again at the start of the month and it would be restored. It turns out that a month ago the meter was turned off for good. I got no warning at all that the legacy sites were going to be shut down. Others got a few days notice to save anything before it was gone forever. I think there were probably about five of us left.

So, it’s gone and it is not coming back. It’s a coincidence that I started this blog at around the same time, but a good one. I have all of the files from the original site and may reprise some text if it still seems relevant. Some of it definitely isn’t, maybe most of it. The photos are pretty much useless other than for nostalgia since the bandwidth upon which the infrastructure was built was such that users complained bitterly about any inline image bigger than a thumbnail.

Update: I have the site running locally on my desktop now so if anyone needs an extract I can get it easily.

What were you doing in the sword and fittings world back in 1996?

Can you name them all?

This was taken by Yoshikawa Eichi out in Yamanashi prefecture. Starting on the left, Michiko and Mamaru Hagihara, Jim Kurasch, Min Shintaku, Yoshikawa Kentaro sensei, Gordon Robson, Mrs. Yoshikawa, Mr. Omino, Jim and Laurine Gilbert and Sam Oyama.