About Us
We are happy that you found us and are curious to know more! We are, as you already heard, primarily an IRC network. With it comes the aspect of our Chicago-based web community and also our annual NeoCon event. Read on to learn more!
History
Neoturbine's story starts in late 2001 when Dmitriy met Joe at his new school after moving to a Chicago suburb. Over the course of the school year, the danger duo (along with some of Joe's friends) decided to pool their interest in technology and the Internet to create a web development team. The following summer, Dmitriy came up with the name Neoturbine and Steve (then visiting Chicago) provided the 1st hosting spot under his Gaming Fusion project, and the brand was born.
The web development idea never really took off. Several versions of a website were made but were never completed as core team members would move or became busy with schoolwork. As the project constantly drifted apart or enjoyed spurts of progress by constantly starting over, Steve got busy running an IRC server on his PC and in summer of 2003 he also registered neoturbine.net. Eventually, he linked his server with Trevor, who he met on Freenode the previous year. From there on, friends and online contacts started visiting the IRC network and it solidified as part of the Neoturbine brand.
After a hard drive crash in 2005 and a reality check, we have abandoned the web development project and focused solely on the IRC network. That June, the core members of Neoturbine with a few friends decided to have a BBQ at a forest preserve in Illinois and by being oblivious to preserve rules, were confronted by police for being there after hours. Despite being a bit shaken by the experience, the group had at it again the following summer with even more people and under more legal circumstances, thus creating the Neoturbine Convention (or NeoCon for short) - a tradition that has persisted annually ever since.
In 2007 things started to look up. The 3rd NeoCon totaled about 26 people in attendance, including Trevor and his friend Jeff - the 1st non-Chicago members to show up. The network has been steadily growing and getting more servers and services. To reflect the changes, Dmitriy created a design for Neoturbine and a new attempt to make the website reflect the network and services, codenamed Seti, has begun. While work was still slow, a whole subsection was completed for NeoCon in time for the 2008 event after switching the website to a PHP framework. As of late 2008, the main site is slowly and systematically being developed to link the IRC services with a web interface and provide visitors with something worthwhile to look at.
Mission, Goals and the Future
Since Neoturbine is an optimistic hobby project rather than a profit-driven entity, our mantra and mission have always been about being helpful and expanding our community. We like to think of ourselves as a digital tavern on a side road of the Internet - a place that is helpful with technical issues as well as a place for meeting new people. We are looking to expand our community with more members, more servers, more features, more connections, and more variety for years to come, topping it all off with a personal touch of meeting each other in real life for events such as NeoCon. As our adopted Cheers cliché goes, we want to be the place "where everybody knows your name."
