"That Guy"
I started streaming about 2000 because I could not find any good breaks station online. So it started out like this. I was desk jockey at day (disc jockey on the weekends) working at an engineering company doing some CAD drafting. I was bringing in CD's to work so I'd have something to listen to. In the mornings I'd pick out about 5 CD's that I was in the mood for. That was okay but I
quickly realized that what I wanted to hear in the morning was not what I wanted to hear 2-3 hours later when I really woke up. The more awake I was the faster and harder the music became. Especially on Friday. TGIF! I thought to myself, I'll just bring in my whole CD case which held 300 CD's. That case is an aluminum case, like small suitcase. Well, I did that for a week or two and people were looking at me funny. I was "that guy" with the suitcase....that was awkward. I realized that I could not continue to bring in the metal luggage everyday. I had to figure out something better. "Tech Geek"
I started to think...it would be really cool if I can just listen to my music over the internet from my house. Then I would not be "that odd guy". I did a little research and discovered some people where using Winamp to stream music. The software needed was really simple. Back then I had cable internet with Excite@home. It was of course much slower in those days. I had 128k outgoing bandwidth. That is not much but it was enough to send out a stream or two at a low quality. Certainly not as good as I have now. I thought to myself, hey, I am tech geek, this would be cool and a fun thing to do. So I recorded a bunch of my CD's, setup the stream and whammo! I had my own personal Internet radio station. Down the road I started adding things like the request capability so I can control my songs. It worked really good for one or two people. Good enough to solve my problem.
“Spread My Addiction”
My personal station worked really good. I thought I should share this with friends so I created a web page and then I found one of those lame free domain names so people could find me online. The domain name was djgremlin.mine.nu. It wasn’t the coolest but it worked. I was official, I was online, I was Gremlin Radio. Well, you know how hobbies can be….they need money. Also at the same time I paid for my first stream server company to host my stream so I could have more listeners. You cannot do much with only two slots or so for listeners. So the added stream server really allowed me to grow with listeners. After about a year or so of operation I had regular more listeners and went big time with my own domain name. of ’02 GremlinRadio.com was on the map. "Lagniappe"
For a little humor, check out a snapshot of the old djgremlin.mine.nu website here [link=http://web.archive.org/web/20011024062827/djgremlin.mine.nu/gremlinradio/default.htm]djgremlin.mine.nu[/link]. I had 3 DJ’s on the station and only 284 songs…. Wow. Here is another entertaining archive snapshots after I upgraded to [link=http://web.archive.org/web/20030422065249/http://www.gremlinradio.com/]GremlinRadio.com[/link]…boy did it grow quick. Hope you enjoyed the history. Kipp
