Brother, can you spare a dime?

Hard to believe, but Miles Ahead has been on the internet for almost eighteen years. The first mostly-plain-text version was launched in the spring of 1995 at netcom.com, written in emacs and pico while connected by telnet to a Unix shell account. The first modem we had was a blistering 28.8 kbps U.S. Robotics model, which seemed perfectly adequate at the time -- after all, you didn't need much bandwidth to write shell scripts, or to send/receive plain text e-mail, or to do Veronica or Jughead searches of Gopher sites, or to browse the web with Lynx; and besides, the whole Miles Ahead site fit easily on half of a 3.5" floppy disk. (Of course, ours being a dial-up coonection, all the time spent working online meant busy signals for incoming calls and impatient family members waiting for an open phone line.) After a year or so at Netcom, I moved the site to the University of Maryland Unix system, and converted the session and record files from plain text to HTML (still written using pico, with sporadic attempts at using the amazingly primitive first-generation HTML editors). That was all right, but it didn't scale well; after a few years it became clear that site with a database behind it would be a lot easier to maintain than 400+ HTML files. So in the fall of 1999 I spent several weekends importing the Miles Ahead data into a Microsoft Access database, and I decided to try my hand at Microsoft's Active Server Pages (and later, Microsoft's ASP.NET) to display the data, allow for queries, etc. That meant moving the site again, and for the first time I had to find a Windows web hosting provider for the site. Over the years I've had a number of web hosts, but for the past several years Miles Ahead has been hosted by a terrific web provider called DiscountASP.NET. They don't give this service away, of course: the yearly cost of maintaining Miles Ahead has been about $140 -- that's hosting fees plus the price of registering the plosin.com domain.

Microsoft Access is a poor database engine, especially as the back-end of a website where there may be multiple concurrent users. Over time I grew increasingly frustrated with its poor performance and its unreliability -- so in 2010 I abandoned Access and decided to use Microsoft's SQL Server as the database engine behind the Miles Ahead web forms. Obviously the paltry amount of data in Miles Ahead, and the modest traffic on the site, don't require an enterprise-level database, but the performance and reliability of Miles Ahead have improved with a more robust database behind it. Of course the good folks at DiscountASP.NET don't give SQL Server away either. The decision to move to SQL Server has increased the cost of maintaining Miles Ahead by $120/year.

This, you might say, is the price of doing business. And an additional $10/month is not going to break the bank. But if anyone would like to make a small donation to help pay the bills for Miles Ahead, I've set up a way to do that via PayPal. Just click on the "Donate" button to the left and you'll be taken to the PayPal site where you can donate whatever amount you'd like. (Of course PayPal doesn't give this away, either: a small percentage of your donation goes to them -- the price of doing business again -- but most of it is deposited in my PayPal account.) And if the sum of people's contributions comes anywhere close to the maintenance costs for Miles Ahead, I will disable this form -- at least until the next billing cycle.

Thanks in advance.