The History of Dave's Celebrity Birthdays
The history of my hobby actually began when I was young lad in the mid-1970's. On the morning of February 26th (I don't even remember exactly which year it was), I heard a DJ announce that it was Johnny Cash's birthday. The late Man in Black will always be an idol of mine. I noted his birthday on my calendar (store bought and paper-based in those days). Each year thereafter, I copied that birthday onto February 26th of the new calendar.
Years later, in the 1980's, I began watching TV shows like Entertainment Tonight, and began keeping track of the birthdays they mentioned near the end of each episode. I also began gathering information from a variety of other sources. Still before the days of the internet, I would copy, and recopy, my growing list of celebrity birthdays on sheets of loose leaf paper. The list grew rapidly to several hundred entries, but was very difficult to manage. Many times, different sources would give different birthdays for the same person. With only handwritten lists, the larger the list became, the harder it became to find and eliminate the duplicates.
Enter the personal computer. It was 1992 when I first converted my handwritten lists to a database. The list was up to about 700 names by that time. Once on a computer, the list became much easier to manage. Updates were much easier, duplicates were easily eliminated, and the list grew by leaps and bounds from there.
In 1994, the internet became involved for the first time, as I began to discover a multitude of web sites I could use for sources. Then, in 1996, with a database of about 3,500 names, I began e-mailing a weekly list of celebrity birthdays to a select group of friends. The database continued to grow (today it contains over 13,000 entries), but subscriptions to the mailing list stalled after a couple of years once I had introduced most of my friends to it. Most enjoyed it, and many have received it since the beginning.
It was late 1997 when I first thought of the idea of creating a web site of my own to open the list to everyone with web access. It was not until September 2000, however, when a friend gave me a link to an HTML Tutorial page, that I began to experiment with a page of my own. The result is the site you see before you today, which first went online at Yahoo/Geocities on December 1, 2000. In late March of 2001, I moved the site to the Lycos/Tripod server, where it remained for over 16 years. In April 2017, for a variety of reasons, I moved the site again - this time to Google Sites, where it continues to reside today, and continues to evolve. The latest layout of the site, which you are looking at today, went live in October of 2020.
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