About Nelefa

Whassitallabaht, then, eh? EH? Nelefa.org has been around, in one form or another, since 1995 (or thereabouts). So, time for a brief history:

Set the way-back machine to, oooo, 1993. Mucking around in Easynet ’s announce newsgroup introduced me to the Bronzen Adonis’ that are Matt Saunders and Neil Levine, founders of the terminally vacuous Yoyo Internet Services. These princely chaps subsequently introduced me (in a roundabout sort of way) to the splendid Dave Newton (no relation to Isaac) who was responsible (curse him) for getting me a job in Cyberia Edinburgh (soon to become Realise Ltd). (No links, cos me and realise? - we’re not speaking. Which is more my fault than Realise’ I have to say.)

So I ended up doing UNIX sysadminny netty stuff (being a bit of a UNIX bod and one of the few people in 1995 Edinburgh who recognised that plonking a server on the end of a leased line might not be the most secure thing in the world).

At about the same time, I started writing some silly DOS based remakes of old Speccy games for RetroSpec (no link cos their domain name was poached), most of which can be found in the games category. Nelefa.org was registered as a vanity domain to give me a handy site to stick all the game related gubbins on. And I’ve just realised how archaic “vanity domain” sounds. Does anyone still call them that? Anyway - the meaning of the word Nelefa is largely apochryphal and I’m not going into it here.
Since then, it’s gone from strength to a kind of sickly undeath - being hosted on various boxes from my grubby old Sun ELC (sadly now deceased. The last winter was just too much for the old girl) through a nice shiny E220R to the pinnacle of web serving science that is the current incarnation at Yoyo.

The unsavoury individuals behind nelefa.org are John and Debbie Dow. We’ve been married since 1989 and have three berserk children. Increasingly, Sir Chewbury Gubbins, Knight of the Wholly Gnarly Widget has been taking over the site for his own nefarious ends.

I (John - for it is he) work at the simply splendid IntroNet Applications (again - I did leave, briefly, for an adventure around Australia, but missed haggis too much), and do a spot of writing in my spare time (or what spare time is left over once Warcraft and Nintendo have taken their pound of flesh).

Debbie does a wonderful job of preventing the three aforementioned children from becoming feral while turning out a steady supply of lovely studies in pastel and acrylic.

This site aims to cover the things which we feel are important to us. And some stuff that really isn’t important at all. Or interesting. Or even remotely relevant.

Truth be told, most of it is really a gaming diary with a bit of rambling thrown in because we never seem to actually get any time to write anything.