The domain “the-cow.net” was purchased in the year 2002 by Alvan, who was getting bored with his life and thought building a webpage with a weblog would be a nice way to spend his time. At first it was a way to ease on the everyday worries – his breakup and moving back to Helsinki, but slowly bigger thoughts emerged. First of these was the Gallery page for himself, which he had previously had on his university server in static html. With the new domain and PHP capabilities, this was turned into a dynamic gallery with commenting and niftiness.

Next step was to create a gallery for two of his friends, Larsa and Spikey, using the same base of a gallery software he had created for his own page. These were refined and highly independent from the rest of the site. No real synergy existed between the sites.

One day, in something like 2004, Alvan and Spikey were hanging at Makasiinit parking lot and thinking that “Gee, we should create a common site for all of us where we can write blogs and do other nifty shit too.”

That thought was quickly forgotten, and Alvan went on upgrading his own site with little regrets, until in January 2006 he was hit by a damn nasty flu that kept him indoors for 3 weeks. During that time, he coded most of the stuff needed for a truly collaborative site. Around the same time Larsa found himself with a full site of his own, no-longer needing the-cow.net to harbor his homepage and gallery.

edit, 2009: 3 more years have passed, and nothing has changed.