Back in 1982, my first personal computer was equipped with a 300 baud modem, and I was a high school student who was also a subscriber to the online services CompuServe and Dow Jones News/Retrieval. I also discovered bulletin board systems, regularly dialing into the Milliways BBS in Oklahoma City, which took its theme from the Douglas Adams science fiction comedy installment The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Tech nerds were geeks in multiple realms.

In junior high, I had enjoyed the book series Alfred Hitchcock & The Three Investigators, and I gradually discovered some of his films on late night television, including Psycho. So, when I decided to start my own BBS, I chose that as a theme. The Bates Motel BBS was filled with silliness such as the menu option to log off the system being labeled Take a shower.

Given my age, that was appropriately juvenile. In college, my friend Sam subscribed to Byte magazine, which introduced me to Jerry Pournelle’s fantastic column, Computing at Chaos Manor. That influenced me to rename my BBS Micro Manor when it became part of the FidoNet dialup network that predated the world wide web. When I moved to Bartlesville in 1989, the Micro Manor BBS came with me.

In 1995, the dot-com bubble inflated the World Wide Web, and Meador Manor was born on CompuServe a year later. I purchased the MEADOR.ORG top-level domain back in 2000, and Meador Manor shifted from being hosted on CompuServe to Southwestern Bell and then on to CableOne.

In October 2006, I caved and finally “got a Facebook” but back then most people still found my website through web searches. In 2007, I renamed Meador Manor to MEADOR.ORG so that viewers would more clearly associate the blog with its domain.

With Meador Manor no longer referring to my website, I instead used the moniker for my humble abode in Arrowhead Acres. I still enjoyed the alliteration, and it amused me to attach a grandiose name to a house which is smaller than today’s median home size and less than 3/4 of the size of the average new home in 2025.

In 2008, I finally gave up on hand-coding the blog in HTML, and MEADOR.ORG shifted to the Blogger service and a few months later to WordPress, where it has remained ever since. I started with the Garland WordPress theme, switched to Enterprise in 2010, Choco in 2011, and finally Twenty ten in 2016. I’ve stuck with that theme for a decade, and I still prefer it. So I’ve only done some minor tweaks to its menu layouts, sidebar widgets, fonts, and background colors.

The first part of 2026 will be a transition as I draw to a close my 37 years of employment with Bartlesville Public Schools. I will officially retire at the end of June, a day before Wendy and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, and my little spot in the World Wide Web will be 30 years old.

Over half of my blog’s traffic is driven by search engines, and around 1/10 of it via Facebook. I don’t think having MEADOR.ORG as the title is particularly helpful anymore, so I’ve decided to return to calling it Meador Manor. I asked the house if that was okay, and it didn’t raise any objections.

So welcome back, in a sense, to Meador Manor. It is still at MEADOR.ORG but you can also surf here via MEADORMANOR.COM or MEADORMANOR.ORG.