3/3/2006 on this forum.
Before that, I was on the Cakewalk USENET newsgroups. There were several of them and I think I remained with those groups long after Cakewalk officially moved its forum to the Web. I didn't join here for a few years because I thought Web-based forums were cumbersome and clunky (they were at the time) and newsgroups were awesome (they were at the time).
But even though the Cakewalk newsgroups were more or less sponsored by Cakewalk, they were unmoderated--which is true for most newsgroups. Lack of moderation results typically results in a stew of great conversations, highly useful information, off-topic silliness, and a few holy wars. A few babbling idiots can gum up the whole works and it's almost impossible to stop them. An official Cakewalk representative could be unmercifully blasted by any jerk with a gripe.
Still, I miss those groups. For a long time, they remained a much better source of information and camaraderie than the Cakewalk-sponsored Web forum. I think they linger on today but they are only a skeleton of what they were.
And before
that, Cakewalk (then Twelve Tone) sponsored a mailing list, which was also great. You could expect to have frequent contact with Greg Hendershott himself. You could tell this was a labor of love for him. It felt more like a club--just a bunch of weird crank hobbyists trying to make music with MIDI. The very first music I made for a TV commercial was probably sequenced in Cakewalk 3.0, so I could transfer the .MID file to my Kurzweil K2000, then take the K2000 to some studio and dump the audio into this new thing called ProTools. Ah, those were the days...
Still have the K2000, though.
I think I've always been KeithAdv but if not, I was some variation of my real name.