The History Of Octane.ie
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Octane.ie But Were Too Afraid To Ask
Octane.ie has a long and colourful history spanning eight (count them!) long years in Ireland, which makes it the oldest surviving car enthusiast site around. At least in this 'ere country. Over the time we've been running we've seen literally dozens of different sites open and close their doors while we take a licking, and keep on ticking.
We've no idea why we're still here. It could be because everytime I get upset, or angry, I'm told to 'suck it up' and get on with it, which tends to work, so here we go, the unadulterated 'History Of Octane'.
Version 1
In The Beginning
Octane.ie started life as a completely different beast. One guy, sitting at a computer, punching out a few words on what driving meant to him. All the basic elements of Octane.ie you see today here today, were around back then. Passion, engineering, all the things you associate with the big blue Octane logo.
It was supposed to be just something small. A tiny blip in the big bad world of the internet. Until Marc Hanlon, rendered homeless by the great AutoPoint.ie/Motornet.ie civil war of 2000, went AWOL from AutoPoint and defected to EamonnOBrien.com and thus... the idea of a website for petrolheads in Ireland was born. A real, proper, live place for the more hardcore car enthusiasts to hang out.
Version 2
A New Look, New Ideas
A few months after the original version of eob.com the idea was born of turning the whole idea into something more. By now, some of the names you'll recognise on the forum to this day, Gaz, DMZ, Ming the Merciless, Toad, Ben, Wheelnut and many other lunatics
were well established, the forum had kicked off into some mad place where trackdays and quad biking sessions were organised, and the whole idea of turning the site into a refuge for petrolheads in Ireland began to take shape. From this motley crew, other people began to slowly filter in. Ben attracted the classic car and old school modifiers. Toad the ever faithful Alfisti. Eamonn attracted mostly sheep.
In homage to the early days, we still keep the second version of EamonnOBrien.Com on the server even though the original domain name is long gone. Though some of the links are currently broken, you can browse the early days by clicking here. The forum from this era is also archived here, albeit in a chopped down format that's missing all the cool spooky green images of the original. Hey, suck it up!
Version 3
The First Octane.ie
While eob.com V2 arrived in a matter of months, the first version of Octane.ie took literally years to make it to a server near you. It was big, bad, and blue and completely different from EamonnOBrien.com. Whereas EamonnOBrien.com was all niche and cult, Octane looked more like a full grown website with pleasing '369' blue and recognisable buttons.
It wasn't without it's changes to the staff, either. While Marc Hanlon would've liked to stay on, he didn't because his dad told him not to or something. With Hanlon gone the onus fell back on Eamonn to make Octane work. Slightly difficult considering while he was a great shapes and colours guy, code wasn't really his thing. So, he drove into Wexford town, asked the girl behind the book counter (who flirted with him, Eamonn was 23 back then and still good looking, these days he looks like a Volvo 240) for her finest book on PHP. After spelling PHP for the girl in the bookshop, it was on order. It cost €42.65 but the upside was Octane.ie was go for launch.
Version 4
Octane Grows Up
Up to this point, the main driving force of the site was Eamonn O'Brien, a rather clumsy chap from deepest darkest Wexford, but it was from Version 4 onwards that the petrolheads started to arrive en masse and started to shape the way Octane.ie would grow. From the VW fans to the ever reliable Alfisti. Octane.ie got bigger, started getting some media mentions and word started to spread from person to person. They'd say 'Hey, check out this site' or, more often than not 'Hey that guy from Wexford just slagged of VW Golfs, let's slash his tyres'.
No matter, at last an alternative to discussing the cheapest diesel saloon or how big a wing could be fitted to the back of a Honda Civic using liberal amounts of 'No More Nails' had been established. And there was much rejoicing.
Behind the scenes, Octane.ie was going through a technical revolution. The internet moves fast, and while the first version of Octane.ie went down a storm, the internet had moved on into the whole idea of interactivity. No more cutting & pasting your content into Dreamweaver templates, it was all about forms and databases. The end result was a website that could be, finally, administered by anyone who could work a PC. This meant the petrolheads started to control the content and not just the editor, which meant more freedom to feature much more stuff on the big blue Octane.
With this version, the idea of meets kicked off in earnest. Trackdays, tunnel runs, some weddings and even an autopsy became part of life on Octane.ie. Then, in one worrying episode, RTE's PrimeTime stole some footage of our resident TVR expert driving through a tunnel at 35mph with his son in the car and labelled it 'joyriders'. This threatened much self examination. Were we joyriders? A quick check revealed we actually own all our own cars and are not wanted by the Gardai so we went back to driving through tunnels and there was much rejoicing. Then we sued PrimeTime.
Version 5
Octane.ie Opens Up
Version 5, like the BMW 5 Series, the Jackson 5, Hi5, and the Rossport 5 was tasteless and largely forgettable which is why the section on this 'History' page is so short. Why? Well, Version 5 was all about technical changes behind the scenes to make Octane more surfable, with less bugs, and faster. It went down a storm and we doubled our hits.
Version 6
Your Surfing It!
The latest and greatest version of Octane and you're surfing it! The final version represents eight whole years of tweaking. It's now the ultimate measure of car culture in Ireland, with everything from eighties hatchbacks, supercars, modified classics and beyond. It's taken us a long time to get here, but we're here, and we're all proud of ourselves.