In 1994 I discovered the Internet and I thought I had discovered the greatest information vehicle that had ever been invented.   The first web page I wrote turned out to be one of the first web pages on the Internet designed to sell term life insurance.  Everyone I knew at the time thought I had completely lost my mind and was wasting my time with this Internet stuff.  I kept telling people that the internet was going to be bigger then television and the more I talked about it the more people were sure I was crazy.

At that time I was an insurance agent and so that is why I wrote my first term life insurance web page.  Some kids at a college had invented a web browser called Mosaic and they had just made a new browser called Netscape.  A couple of other kids at another college had this listing of their favorite web pages in a database that you could search on.  It was named Yahoo and the first time I used Yahoo I did a search on Insurance and found one web page in the search that was for the Hartford insurance company.  I immediately was hit with the idea of selling life insurance using the Internet.  So I started to work learning how to make a web page.  This turned out to be a tough task as there were no books to be found on how to make a web page.  So I just studied the web pages that were out there and wrote the first one using  Notepad.

One day while I was working on this first web page I was driving to an insurance sales appointment and listening to the radio.  I was listening to an interview with Carolyn Wells who was with the Kansas City Barbecue Society and then the another great idea popped into my head.  I had the same feeling Isaac Newton must have had when he discovered gravity.  I said to myself screaming out loud "make a web page about Kansas City Barbecue and sell Kansas City BBQ sauce on it."  I was sure at that time I was going to get rich off of this web page, but that never happened.  Damn I was excited and I still am today thinking about that moment.  In the radio interview Carolyn Wells mentioned that KCBS would give a free copy of their publication called the "BullSheet" to anyone that wanted it.   So as soon as I could get to a telephone I called her and told her I was going to make a web page about barbecue in Kansas City and I am sure she had no idea what I was talking about.   I asked her if I could advertise her offer of a free copy of the BullSheet on it and she said OK.  I also told her that because of this web page on the Internet she might have to give away a lot of newspapers and said that was OK.  A year or so later they withdrew that offer because they were giving away too many copies of the BullSheet.  So I went to work on the insurance and barbecue web pages at the same time.  Now people were really looking at me strange when I talked about these web pages I was working on. 

Back then it was very expensive to get an Internet connection and to get the space to make a web page.  Everyone was charging as much as they could for space to store your web page.  The new barbecue web page was costing me $160 per month in 1995.  But I charged straight ahead and got the web page up and running and I named it the Kansas City Bar B Que Connection.  A few people found the web page and sent emails to me.  You can't believe how exciting this was for me.  People  had actually found my web page and were sending emails of praise to me. 

One of the options that the web server offered was a message board that I could add to the web page.  I thought it would be nice idea to put a forum on the web page and a couple of people thought it was a great idea and so The BBQ Forum was born.  The software was bad at that time and the Perl system on the server didn't work well and it broke all of the time.  Whenever the forum broke down we always lost some data and had to start the forum over again.  However it was wonderful because all of us in different locations could share idea and information on the Internet.

Since I was born and raised in Kansas City barbecue has been around me all my life.  When I started The BBQ Forum I was shocked to find out the everyone in the country did not know what barbecue was.  Some people in parts of this country, even today, have no idea what a brisket is.  When The BBQ Forum started people who had lived in Kansas City and then moved to other parts of the country felt like they were in BBQ Exile.  In fact one of the very first threads on the BBQ Forum went like this:

This in a way describes the feeling that brought all of us together in the very beginning.  People who knew what real barbecue were scattered around the country for what ever reasons.  They all yearned for good barbecue.  Some people around the country knew how to cook barbecue and they were eager to share their knowledge of the fine art of barbecue cooking.  Then through the magic of this new media called the Internet and The BBQ Forum we were all able to communicate.  It was magic to all of us. I replied to Tom's Message with the following.

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