In the beginning, TACE.com was a graphical and text mode multiuser unix bbs system that allowed users to login, send email, read bulletins, transfer files back and forth, participate in discussions, live multi-user chat between users on the system, search for antiques, add/edit/delete antiques, and more. MS-Dos users could use a special terminal program that was designed for use with our bbs software where they would be presented with graphical screens and be able to use their mouse to navigate the system, in much of the same way as AOL and Prodigy did in those days.
At this time, We were known as P.A.C.T. which stood for Personal Antiques using Computer Technology run by our parent company WIN (World Intelligence Network, Inc.)
Text Mode Screen Shots - These images show what it looked like to dialup or telnet into the server using a ANSI/VT100 client. The menus changed a little from 1991-1995, but the functionality is the same.
Graphical Mode Screen shots - coming soon.
One of our magazine ads from the July/August 1992 issue of The Inside Collector.
WIN developed an ms-dos program that allows its vendors to enter a list of items offline and upload them in one shot instead of the vendor having to dialup and login to the online system and enter each item separately.
Also that year, a program was developed to allowed its users to download small packets of information about an item. Then, while not connected, the user could run our PhotoView program and view the item information, and to view an image associated with the item.
At this time, we decided to rename PACT to ACE, which stood for Antique & Collectible Exchange.
We entered the Internet age. We went online with pages generated from our system and uploaded to a webspace provided by a dialup isp account. This was not a live update process, our system would upload newly added or modified items from our database to webpages created on the isp's server. We would also delete any items that where deleted from our server, and update all of the index files to reflect any of the changes. Updates happened about 3 times a day.
We got our own dedicated internet connection for our system and started serving pages directly off of our own server. Item pages where dynamically generated by the webserver for every request. The two systems shared the same database backend and some programming. At this time, we still did not have a domain name but ran under a hostname from our isp. Our name at this time was http://worldint.netdtw.com. Screen Shots of some of the early pages.
We took out our domain name worldint.com on August 2nd 1995. Ironically, 2 days before Ebay took out their name.. At this time, we already had a presence on the internet for 6 months and had online auctions running off our site for 2 months.
We moved the Antique & Collectible Exchange off to its own domain name. TACE.com was officially created. Since ace.com was already taken at this time, we decided that TACE.com would be a nice name for the site.
Between 1996 and now, TACE.com has gone through 4 different layouts, major features added, and lots of small changes.
What will the future for TACE.com hold? Only time will tell. There are lots of major enhancements going on behind the scene of the site, some of them are very exciting.
