UESPWiki:History

This is a brief history of the site over the ages, at least as I remember it. Much of the early details and dates are vague as there are no records available anymore.

• Summer 1994 - First Glimpse of Arena: My first experience with the Elder Scrolls games was with Arena on a friends computer. I remember the scene well: A cityscape at night with snow slowing drifting down between the street lights. While I was just beginning to get into PC computer games at the time, I was seriously impressed. I actually want to push this date back further (almost a year further in the winter of '93) but that would be before Arena was released so I'm assuming my memory is just failing me.

• Fall 1994 - Bought Arena: I was bored one weekend and was in a small computer shop which just happened to have one copy of Arena as one of its dozen games. It was all downhill from here... This was the second game I ever bought (the first being Doom).

• Fall 1994 - Started Daggerfall FAQ: After playing and being very impressed with Arena, I started frequenting the Usenet newsgroups and soon found out about Daggerfall which was in early production at the time. Seeing the general lack of knowledge on the game I started a text FAQ for Daggerfall which was distributed regularily on Usenet.

• Winter 1995 - Daggerfall FAQ Grows: The FAQ grew quickly and two other people joined me in gathering information and editing it (I'll have to dig up their names sometime).

• Summer 1995 - Daggerfall FAQ Website: Early in the life of the WWW, the text FAQ was converted into a web page at www.newforce.ca/~jackel/.

• Fall 1995 - UESP Born: After some discussion/ideas with the other two editors of the FAQ, I created the UESP web site to include information about all the Elder Scrolls games. It was shortly after this that the two other FAQ editors dropped out of sight.

• Fall 1996 - Daggerfall Released: If I got the date right, this was a very busy time and the UESP expanded considerably with Daggerfall information.

• 1997 - Site Moved: I moved the site to the donated www.honesty.com/~jackel/ site (thanks to Moose) once the newforce server started charging based on bandwidth instead of a flat monthly charge (it would have increased the site fee from something like $10 to over $100 a month). I'm unsure of the exact move date.

• 2000 - Site Moved, Again: Due to problems at the donated honesty site, I moved to the donated www.m0use.net/~uesp/ site (which had its network connection graciously donated by Bethesda, thanks!). Again, exact date is uncertain.

• January 2004 - Site Moved, Again: After m0use being down for a few months, I purchased and moved the site to the www.uesp.net domain on a virtual server hosted by Canaca. Hopefully this will be the last move for a while.

• February 2005 - Started Change to Wiki Format: After much research and testing, I decided to move to a wiki-based site. This lets the ES community add and edit the site content as the site has gotten so large I cannot devote enough time to properly maintain it.

• November 2005 - Moved to Dedicated Server: With increasing load due to now being a Wiki as well as Oblivion's release date approaching the site outgrew its virtual server. I switched to a fully dedicated server from iWeb in Montreal which increased the monthly cost from a mere $10 to $100. Typically load on the current server is 10-20% so there is a good amount of room for future growth.