History of NMA

[boer_kameel]

Wow, why did I fail to notice this topic before? It's gold! The memories...

Around '98 - I was 15 then - my mom & stepdad moved to some middle-of-nowhere place, where I had my own studio on their grounds, and pretty much nothing else.
Cutting us a driveway with a chainsaw got me going for a very limited time, so my parents bought a 2nd hand PC from the nutty, game-crazed, always robes wearing 40y old neighbour. He even cheated when playing C&C with me on our 2nd multiplayer bout, at which point I decided to ignore him completely.
Fiddling with the stuff he sold, I found out it featured a SCSI disk, and more importantly, had a 56k modem. I remember hooking it up, hearing the strange sounds - but nothing happened.
My hopes got up when I noticed a "FREE INTERNET" cd at a store. So I took it along (I believe planet internet), and shortly after I spent my first hours on the web. Ignorant to the existance of phone rates.


Amongst my first ventures were a chat with a young Dutch girl I convinced I was 18, talking up about sex. Only later I realized it could just as well have been the nutty neighbour, what did I know.
It didn't take me long to search for Fallout resources, so NMA was a logical stop. How and when I came to register is lost in the mists of time, but I do remember talking to Miro (we lived there for 4y, so has to be between 98-2001). Although his spelling seemed quite odd, mine couldn't have been much better at the time, and I was surprised by his intellect.
I never posted that much, but do remember a lot of the names I sporadically see here. Most vivid is my recollection of a conversation about JR Jansens sig, which still seems to exist http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31920&highlight= (Ps: Shouldn't that be Nunc Aut nunquam?)?

I guess this all should be around the fallout.gamestats time. Don't really recall that well.
The oldest post I can find myself in: http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31974&highlight=


What I do remember, is that NMA had an atmosphere that invited people to show their intellect, and repelled ignorance/stupidity. As I could hardly find such places in real life, I soon concidered it a spiritual home. I like to think I learnt my English grammar from Fallout & NMA, as Miro was about the only one who was not being corrected for spelling mistakes.


How NMA evolved? I think the atmosphere is still the same. Some matured, others left, a newer generation joined. I even saw a post about top10 games, with a guy listing Pokemon and YuGiOh.
At first I was surprised to see no flames or witty comments, to realize that most people probably realized that complete ignorance can be a fast deterrer.



Hmm, I seem to have made quite some noob forum mistakes back then... And, I seem to have seen the mystical non-existent Sulik's Sister . Strange.



---------------------------------------------

Fun topics: How Belgian politics suddenly got Alec going on his foot fetish: http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36354&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

ARTYR's goodbye

Note his name is either "APTYP" or "Arthur", though. The idea behind APTYP is, I think, a cyrillic spelling of "Arthur", though it isn't exactly right, because APTYP would be pronounced "Artoer".

Could just be pronounced like that, in Flemish the pronounciation of Arthur is similar. I imagine a Russian wouldn't say "AaarFur"?

http://web.archive.org/web/19991104024858/fallout.gamestats.com/index.shtml

Now this contains a nice bit of intel: Miroslav's B-day!

--
Saturday, October 23rd
First... by Miroslav - 18:15 EST
Let me say thanx to people who sent me b-day wishes, greeting cards, so on, so on... Thanx guys!
--

As for Miroslav, well after the miltary I hardly talked to him. I had his cell number and could contact him for dns changes and such. But he started to leave after FOT, and still haven't gotten back into the scene. I recently got in touch with him and can say he's doing fine. Oh and he says hi to you guys.

Good to hear he's doing fine! I often worried if nothing bad happened to him during the war... Thanks for clearing that up!

Xotor was good fun, he loved to be in the role of devil´s advocate, even if he agreed with something he had to say the oposite of what was posted just because

Anyone familiar with Jung / Myers-Briggs psychology? Just do a search on "INTP". It's a "character class", to which imho quite some here belong.
One of their traits is: They often like to take the opposite side of a discussion, even when they don't agree with the viewpoints. Just to see what arguments come up. There is a reason to this: evaluate own viewpoints, and the other party's arguing skills.

People from NMA came to that forum, made accounts and started posting in that thread. Soon the numbers were on our side and a lot of the posters that were defending RT got disguisted with it because now they were on the receiving end. Just goes to show the power of Fallout.

I was planning a trip to China. We didn't go with some travel agency, just booked a flight. When posting on NMA I noticed Starseeker's "location". So we PM'ed a bit, and he ended up sitting in Beijing's Starbucks when we landed. He helped us find a hotel, book a train, find a good massage parlor - even asked his girl friend to give us a memorable guided tour! Unforgettable.
So you could say, Fallout brought us together on opposing sides of the globe! One of my favorite stories to anyone claiming "PC's / gaming is asocial".

 

[Deleted member 53669]

I like how Alec's foot fetish is now a stored entry in NMA's archive.

 

[Eternal]

I think the very first time I came across this site was hmm... '04? I would check it out every couple of months, read a couple forum posts and some news and then forget about it. When FINO was announced I remembered the site and came back to check it out, after reading and reading posts for around 6months without registering I finally decided to register and lo and behold here I am.

What keeps me coming here I think is a few things, 1. many people here aren't afraid to voice their opinions, but often due so in a respectful and intelligent manner. 2. Something about Fallout, even as a kid (I was born in '86) really stuck with me, and I just loved it. 3. No mutants are allowed here.

O and I am a glittering gem of hatred.

 

[Yoshi525]

Don't know when I first found this site, it was probably around 6-7 years ago. The board style was the same I know that much. Two things I remember getting my attention: 1) Rosh. 2) Kotario's (think that was the name of the perverted looking fat guy in question...) avatar of a pilot with cig in his mouth, for some reason I thought it was an awesome av.

 

[DammitBoy]

I also found The Order via NMA, when Miro made a newspost about it, and later got TO hosted on an NMA-based WebBBS forum before pulling it off again to my own server and later getting it hosted once again (hence Miro's comment when TO rejoined that "we thought we got rid of them")

This revisionist history of yours completely ignores the fact that, while inbetween servers, the Order was temporarliy hosted by the AOF forum so you lil fellers had a place to meet and post.

As proof, I offer this old AOF boardpic which celebrated our temporary truce;

More proof of kharn's association with the AOF:

bitches...

 

[Maphusio]

Holy shit, reading all of this has been a real treat! I'm sleepless in San francisco due to an overly noisy person in the room above and this has made my day, eer, night... Err morning...

My first experience with NMA (or whatever it's name was at the time) was around 99 - 2000 when playing Fallout 2 for my first time. I used thr site for information purposes mostly, walkthroughs and the like. For some reason it had never occurred to me to join the forum / message board until the hype for Van Buren started. I consider myself lucky that I got to meet and interact with those in the community (although I avoided interactions with Rosh largely because I was scared).

For some reason, after the death of Van Buren and BIS I kept following NMA. I think it was the only web community I truly felt a part of and the only one that I knew would be around for a while. It also served the important role of filling the Post Apoc. void in my life.

All said and done, I do miss the good ol' days, wish I would have had more than 1 (?) interaction with Rosh and wish I could have had a existential conversation of sorts with 4Too. I did have the luxury of taking Kharn to his first American football game where i found he knew the depth charts two or three deep which was a great experience.

I'd say my most cherished / recalled memory on the forums was the Future Shop account of the NMA community which Kharn so nicely tied in with the tittle of his wonderful article "Glittering Gems of Hatred" - "Eleven angry guys on a website".

 

[El Pagano Loco]

Can someone tell me who is the oldest member around that still posts even semi-frequently?

 

[Madbringer]

Damn this thread brings back memories.

This was around the time I got kicked out of the UV for being an annoying little cunt(...)

Haha, i still sometimes wonder how the Villagers could tolerate my horribly broken English and juvenile rants. I was like 12-13 back then, could barely say "sure" to Petrarch (going by Paladin back in those days, if memory serves right) asking me to partake in a spell of Diablo 2.

Good times. *wipes nostalgia tear off*

Can someone tell me who is the oldest member around that still posts even semi-frequently?

Going by this thread, that would be either Kharn/Brother None, Odin or one of the other Orderites. It's impossible to say, really, you'd have to dig up fifteen year old archives to check who's the most oldschool and badass of them all.

 

[boer_kameel]

Damn this thread brings back memories.

This was around the time I got kicked out of the UV for being an annoying little cunt(...)

Haha, i still sometimes wonder how the Villagers could tolerate my horribly broken English and juvenile rants. I was like 12-13 back then, could barely say "sure" to Petrarch (going by Paladin back in those days, if memory serves right) asking me to partake in a spell of Diablo 2.

Good times. *wipes nostalgia tear off*

Same here! Looking back at my old posts here I was quite a brat. Keeping an old account alive has its downsides.

Can someone tell me who is the oldest member around that still posts even semi-frequently?

Going by this thread, that would be either Kharn/Brother None, Odin or one of the other Orderites. It's impossible to say, really, you'd have to dig up fifteen year old archives to check who's the most oldschool and badass of them all.

I joined around 2001, might have been earlier, Brother None and Odin were already here. Not that I would use the words I and Frequently in the same sentence, even with Fairly in between.

 

[Mysterious Stranger13]

According to this profile, the oldest NMA member is someone who goes without a name, that joined in January 1970.

Impossible, according to Nukapedia, NMA was started by Miroslav in 1997

 

[alec]

Can someone tell me who is the oldest member around that still posts even semi-frequently?

Going by this thread, that would be either Kharn/Brother None, Odin or one of the other Orderites. It's impossible to say, really, you'd have to dig up fifteen year old archives to check who's the most oldschool and badass of them all.

Brother None is not old at all, he's in his twenties or something.
I think DammitBoy is the oldest semi-frequently posting member, he's probably close to 50.

 

[Talisien]

I got the FO/FO2 bundle from my little brother as a present back in 2005, I think it was. I was instantly hooked- I must've devoted a good 200 hours to playing them in the first month, lol. That dropped off a bit with time, but I still played a bit every day for a long time. Then my PC crashed. When I got a new one, it had a custom graphics card that did NOT like either game, in addition to its well-known quirks with Windows XP. I started hunting the net for help, which led me to join NMA. That was September 15, 2006, according to the forum. (Geez, it's been that long already?)

I was fairly regular in my appearances here for a while- the boards were lively, the people were entertaining, and I had fuck-all else to do with my time, anyway. Ah, those were the days... I miss seeing Rosh mauling people... And getting into arguments over trivial points of the science involved in the game canon with Sander... *sigh* Good times, good times.

And then the real world imploded around me, forcing a long absence from all things fun. It's just in the last year or so I've had time to get back to the things I used to enjoy... Like Fallout. Of course, now there's a whole new set of headaches, making it work on Windows 7, lol... Not to mention the trouble I had installing it, since my current PC is a notebook that is totally lacking a disc drive. Plus, every person I know with a computer is using a Mac, lol. Thank god for external hard drives and manual installations.

So, here am I, back once again at NMA, possibly picking up where I left off. I might even get back in to modding. I wonder if I can find, on one of my hundreds of back-up discs, the Alcatraz Project I started back then...?

 

[DammitBoy]

Brother None is not old at all, he's in his twenties or something.
I think DammitBoy is the oldest semi-frequently posting member, he's probably close to 50.

I'm 53, but I'm not a member.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

2001, my school. NMA, checked up on fallout trivia for the lulz and then forgot about the site until 2004; been lurking ever since. Now a day without Brother None is like a day without oxygen.

 

[Arcanix]

I was too busy playing FOT to be active here back then. Though i do remember Silencer and PaladinHeart being somewhat active here. I bet it was promotion of that WWII mod or something.

 

[BigBoss]

First time I came around these boards was 2005, but I was just a drifter back then (and things seemed to tense, probably because I was only 13 at the time). Then I came back in 07-08 (under a different name which the hell I can't remember) and died out again with like a total of 20 posts. Then I rediscovered Fallout at the bottom of a nearly 3 year old box in my closet, and thought to myself "Hey, what the hell ever happened to NMA?" Here I am for a third time.

Anyways the vibe here has definitely changed. Every time I come here (especially when I start going through the really old threads), I always get the same kind of vibe I guess someone visiting the Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids would get. You know, that kind of "This place was once an apex of civilization (or, in our case, the internet/fallout community), but has since long fallen from greatness and is sadly abandoned" feeling.

I don't know what keeps me here. I still get that vibe I described above though everytime I come here, and thats probably why I stay. Better to see the pyramids like this than to have never seen them at all.

 

[Per]

I can't believe no one mentioned the great forum migration of 2013 yet. I remember it like it was yesterday. The forum lost a little of its history with old user avatars, special titles and word censors, but is the soul of a web community not the sum of its current members? Nobody really knows. Into the uncertain future we wobble while a brass band sombrely plays "March of the Lizards".

 

[Atomkilla]

I can't believe no one mentioned the great forum migration of 2013 yet. I remember it like it was yesterday. The forum lost a little of its history with old user avatars, special titles and word censors, but is the soul of a web community not the sum of its current members? Nobody really knows. Into the uncertain future we wobble while a brass band sombrely plays "March of the Lizards".

Ironically, little after the Great Migration, there was a loss of newly gathered information - among the fallen were posts celebrating that historical event.

 

[BigBoss]

I can't believe no one mentioned the great forum migration of 2013 yet. I remember it like it was yesterday. The forum lost a little of its history with old user avatars, special titles and word censors, but is the soul of a web community not the sum of its current members? Nobody really knows. Into the uncertain future we wobble while a brass band sombrely plays "March of the Lizards".

Yeah... I must have missed that one.

 

[maximaz]

I lurked around here and some other Fallout site for awhile (I'm not even entirely sure one of them was NMA, could have been some other two Fallout sites) then I kind of just started frequenting NMA and treated the entire forum as a sort of news feed for awhile. I got a sense that people here were generally older and more consistent than anywhere else so I eventually joined, very cautiously.

As much fun as Roshambo was, I tried to avoid interacting with the guy directly and then I reaaaally got into it with him, got banned as a result and left for quite awhile. Obviously, rejoined in 2006 with my current nick and have been here pretty consistently ever since. I have to say that the lack of good Fallout games and news is definitely felt, when it comes to the site's pulse over the years.