When and how did AN begin?

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Specializes in LTC.

Just curious...:)

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Specializes in Emergency Nursing.

In the beginning Brian created the heavens and the earth . . .

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Brian Short started the beginnings of AN around 1994 or so while he was in nursing school as I recall. Do an internet search on "the wayback machine" site and you can find screen shots of AN as it appeared back in 2000 or so. Fascinating reading. The thread topics haven't changed much at all. I have read somewhere where Brian talks about this. Maybe you can find it by looking around the site. Brian?

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Specializes in CCU, Geriatrics, Critical Care, Tele.

thanks for asking the question. i posted this initially back in 2002, then i updated it last in 2008. we've hit many milestones since then, the history notes below needs updating again as we have had significant growth since 2008 :)

maybe we should have an "about allnurses.com page" instead of this info getting buried in old threads?

from the thread titled: allnurses.com history?

https://allnurses.com/general-nursing-discussion/allnurses-com-history-17451.html

ok, here goes a brief history of allnurses.com.....

back in 94 or 95 when i was in nursing school at minneapolis community college, i just started tinkering around with the internet (back in the early days), i had just bought my first computer, a 486 25 mhz, back when cd roms were just coming out, it was a nice computer at the time :) . back then, it was not that easy to find nursing related information online. you would do a search and you would find info on breast feeding, or planting trees and a few nursing websites. so i decided to start to organize a few nursing webpages as a hobby. it then grew into a passion and consumed lots of time, but i enjoyed it. i did not have any formal webpage training or computer, so it was slow moving. i started to learn more about websites, and added a few new features now and then, i got e-mail from people all over the world, commenting and complementing the site, which was quite encouraging.

my internet service provider at the time included some free web space, so initially the website address was something like:

ally.ios.net/~bshort19 or something silly like that, but hey, it was free :) i called the site worldwide nurse. after awhile, i decided to buy the domain name wwnurse.com, which was short for worldwide nurse.

august 1997, i decided to start an e-mail newsletter called "nurse-zine". the first issue went out to over 100 subscribers.

september 1997, started a discussion forum for nurses for several different specialties. this was a text based forum, much different than what we have now, but at the time, it was pretty cool. ;) i continued to add new nursing specialty forums as people requested them. this is also the time when we got our first paying sponsor, up to this point; all the expenses and time were out of my pocket.

july 1998, we upgraded to a new bulletin board system, which we could not import all the previous discussions, so we basically started over from scratch with new discussions. but it didn’t take long for people to fill it up with discussions.

march 2000, we changed our domain name from wwnurse.com to allnurses.com. why the name change? the name allnurses.com is much easier to remember, and in reality, it better describes what and who we are about... all nurses!

may 2001, we upgraded to our current bulletin board system, which we were able to import all our existing threads and post.

march 2006

allnurses.com celebrated 10 years online!

largest online nursing community celebrates 10-year anniversary

allnurses.com getting 500,000 unique visitors, 5 million page visits each month and our e-mail newsletter, nurse-zine, has over 125,000 subscribers.

june 2006

allnurses.com is breaking all kinds of records

150,000 registered members - at any given time of the day, there are around 2000 visitors on at the same time. on june 6th, we had a record number of 2,897 users online at the same time (06-07-2006 at 09:15 pm)

february 2007

allnurses.com breaks 200,000 member milestone

thanks to all our staff and members who help continue to tell others interested in nursing about allnurses.com!

sept 2007

up to 232,977 members, website was redesigned in june 2007. growing and growing.

february 2008

265,236 members, over 6 million pagevisits a month, almost 600,000 unique visitors a month!

allnurses.com is clearly the most active and most popular nursing website in the world, with over 2 million individual postings with over 255,007 discussion topics. (see current numbers at the bottom of main forum page)

i hope that helps answer a few questions about the history of allnurses.com ;)

i must give thanks to all of the amazing volunteer staff, administrators, moderators, they help keep an a welcoming environment and enforce our terms of service. i also want to thank all of our loyal users and those who helped the site grow by spreading the word to your colleagues and friends, if it wasn’t for all of you we would not be where we are today! over the years, our users have given us tons of feedback and thousands of suggestions helping us improve your favorite nursing site. keep the suggestions coming :)

and thanks for all the kind words, it is very appreciated :)

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Thanks for posting this Brian. Agree that an "all about" page would be great for this post. I knew that I read it somewhere!

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Specializes in Emergency Nursing.

Either an all about page or a sticky at the top of each of the forums would work.

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Specializes in RN, BSN, CHDN.

Thank you Brian you know how we all love you

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If it weren't for Brian where would we go for entertainment and support?

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Specializes in Emergency Nursing.
If it weren't for Brian where would we go for entertainment and support?

The local bar?

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Specializes in LTC.

Thanks Brian. It was an interesting read. We should have a sticky or an "AN history, or All about" page.

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Specializes in CCU, Geriatrics, Critical Care, Tele.

I really appreciate all your nice comments smiley-ashamed007.gif, but, I don't deserve all the credit ;) All I did was create a website for nurses to learn, share knowledge and network with each other. The real magic is all of you!

The AN Staff, Admins, Moderators, Nurses, students and all AN members are what make allnurses.com such an amazing place for us all!

All of you help make this a wonderful source of knowledge sharing, a welcoming environment for people to feel safe and participate in discussions! Posting intriguing nursing discussions and topics that all nurses can relate to. Sharing nursing related news and tips for the benefit of the whole community! It's really amazing!

For all of you that appreciate AN, remember that all the staff that help do a wonderful job moderating and keeping the site clean from spam and personal attacks and enforce our Terms of service is a big reason why so many people enjoy AN!

Thanks to all of you!

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Specializes in Emergency Department.

Thank you !!!!!:redbeathe

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