Prehistory: Pressibus was created in November 1990 and has developed, essentially via the study of the French newspaper cartoon-strip, under the aegis of Alain Beyrand, the author of these lines, who has also been responsible for bringing Pressibus to the Internet.


• 1997, early days with a local ISP
  
  The Pressibus site was launched on 19 January 1997. Its address was http://www.lenet.fr/pressibus, because it was set up in association with the company Lenet, located in Tours (France, Loire valley), just 1 km from Pressibus itself.

Pages were written using Microsoft Publisher 97, an inexpensive piece of software which allows one to build a site quickly, from existing documents.


• 1997, high growth
  
  The allocated disk place was only 1 Mb, which was very small in relation to the potential material available to Pressibus, since, from its creation, the group has published a large number of journals (see the chapter about Pressibus publications in the chapter Studies in comics).
  
  To keep within the allocated limit while presenting the maximum of information, no pictures were used. So the site was able to grow rapidly. But a site relating to comic-strips without images proved very frustrating. Even for Lenet... And Lenet allowed Pressibus to have 2 Mo, then 5 Mo, then more... So, this allowed:
  • the illustration of the pages relating to comic-strips and addition of many more pages, distributed over 5 sites:
    • Newspaper heroes in the French newspapers of the fifties and sixties,
      
    • Femmes d'Aujourd'hui, comics in a women's magazine,
      
    • Marten Toonder & M. Bommel (available in English from September),
      
    • Studies in comics,
      
    • Comics from here and there.
  • the creation of new sites, which first existed as single pages, grew and grew:
    • Ataxx games, a new page on April the 7th, available in English from June the 21st,
    • the Internet Perso site, a new page in February, available in English from August,
    • the Showcase of freeware, a new page in February, available in English from August,
  
  In parallel, the organisation of the site changed:
  • very rapidly the single-directory structure (standard for Publisher 97) was replaced by a multi-directory structure,
  • then, progressively, Publisher was discarded and the sites were instead written directly in HTML (see the technical details on the site "Internet Perso", in the chapter "Hints on creating a site"). Pages were sometimes very large, written in very small fonts, with few illustrations. They have now spread out into comfortably-spaced, well-illustrated pages, to the right of a frame which acts as a menu.
  
  In December, this logo first saw the light of day
  
  
• 1998, initially a big hesitation
  
  On January 1998, all the Pressibus sites were receiving about 40 visits per day, providing a solid base of over 14,000 visits per year, which augured well for the future...
  
  But Lenet was now only interested in commercial sites, which the small Pressibus site could not claim to be. The temptation was for Pressibus set up as an organisation in its own right with its own internet-domain with its own domain-name, now pressibus.org. But no solution was immediately forthcoming...
  
  So in February, Pressibus moved to the ISP Infonie for... a whole week! The site address was http://perso.infonie.fr/pressibus. The space-allocation was 15 Mb.
  
  What happened? The company Val de Loire Electronique, which had set itself up on the Internet the year before, at the same time as Pressibus, at the instance of its Chairman, made Pressibus an offer a financial support.
  
  
• 1998, a new dimension
  
  So Pressibus now had its domain name, the site address was http://www.pressibus.org (or http://www.pressibus.org) (from February the 15th), and 25 Mb of space was now available, and Pressibus used a Web server, and an FTP server.
  
  These can be seen on the Lenex site (now gramond.com). This formula is relatively affordable for all but the very smallest set-ups. The site is physically situated in the USA, on a Silicon Graphics computer.
  
  So in February :
  • The Reversi album site was created,
  • almost all Pressibus sites became downloadable,
  • mailing lists were established to keep users better informed.
  
  
  
• 1998, a growing audience
  
  Statistics on the new site gave evidence of a substantial growth in readership, since the average visits per page per day went up from 600 in February to 2500 by the end of 1998. The site also grew:
  • creation of a site about the newsgroup system Niouzenet (March),
  • completion of the Reversi site (August),
  • beginning of a chapter about Linux on the Windows freeware site (October),
  • creation of the site concerning the early days of the comic-strip (November),
  • new chapter with information about the French Internet, including access to radio, on the site Internet Perso (November),
  • pages about various American artists in the chapter BD from here and there,
  • indexation by author, by title and by article on all the Pressibus sites relating to comics.
  
  So, since February 1999, still with gramond.com, the Pressibus site has had an allocation of 50 Mb and is additionally aided by the fact that I have had a cable-connection to the Internet since November 1998. So all set for the future...

Page created by Alain Beyrand on 16 February 1998,
updated on 30 January 1999

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