History Of Customization

In the beginning there was darkness. And on the first day, the spirit of Fli7e gazed upon the WinAmp and he said: "dude, I can reshack them bitmaps". And lo, customisation was born. And on the second day, the Soft of the Null noticed these reshacked versions and released a version with extracted, easily changeable graphics. And from that day forth this was called skinning.

No doubt that there are earlier examples (on various platforms), but the current movement started there.

Well, that takes care of everything I had to contribute.

i remember when the most you could do to customize your computer was change the color of the desktop background...

this looks to be a great project for the community to work on. i can't wait to see how it goes!

whooo, a decade :)

So do we all have to get Custo a 10th anniversary gift? =)

Man, when you start listing former staff at lost sites are you ever going to see my name a lot. >XD

Ok this is good, i've put craeonics little story up ;) Can anyone remember what other skinnable apps where important back in the day... what was the first way to theme windows, was it Litestep?

I think a history of customize.org and it's trends and innovations would be much easier to tackle than a general history of desktop customization.

But heck, I'd read either.

Yeah that would be easier, we have a year to do this tho so why not ;) I'd imagine it will end up as more of a history of customize.org but at least this way we don't exclude anything of interest that might have happened elsewhere

I've been thinking of wwriting a history of skinning one day (hell, I even study history these days). But not now. I do have some random pointers:

- The first "skins" (reshacked versions of WinAmp) popped up at layer3.org. This was a bit before my time, but I get the impression the skinners of these days had some links to the demo scene.

- The term "skin" comes from the skins used for characters in Quake and the like.

- Toasty on the history of skinz.org and eFX.

- Some stuff on the history of DeskMod in this gorman interview from 2001.

- The history of DevArt, part 1 and 2, by jarkles, after he got kicked out. Which is quite a different angle than what came out of Tek's 2001 interview with jark and matteo.

- Froggles' annual Skin Primer also contains a section on the history of skinning, from a StarDock perspective.

I would most definitely read a history of Custo and/or all customization. And I usually dislike reading about history.

Let's not get the rivals Deviant art involved shall we.....

you got rivals at dA adz?

do you see them as rivals? :|

@amadme: Not individuals, but I think dA is a rival site for us at customize.

Really, were friends but it's nice to have competition between the two.

in fact, DA is a partner site of custo. There's no need for competition, DA isn't a customizing site.

And on the 7th day God said...let there be skins!

egolatra: dA is a customizing site.
Click on all categories>customizing.

-well adz, dA is a custo site, but not mainly...

-i mean, there you can find artist that don't make any use of computers, but to scan/upload their works
-but if you're looking to really "Pimp your ride at the virtual world" ...this is the right spot ...is there any other?

-btw some members right here are members there (like me) (haven't uploaded there :s)

I tried to upload there... DeviantART is really just for art. Customize is mainly for what it says customization. Ya know?

But if you sift there all the "stuff" you can find some great art though.

I agree with what some of you are saying. Deviant art is all about art!

DevArt started as a skin site and was nice and quiet, but after six months the floodgates of Teen Angst opened and ever since it's been all about "art".

adz_619 says:

egolatra: dA is a customizing site.
Click on all categories>customizing.

I know that, i submit some of my stuff in there, but what i mean is: DA isn't just a customizing site. They have a lot of categories, so, telling that, we are a pure customizing site. If we had to compete, our rivals should be, i.e. wincustomize

craeonics, layer3 was actually the second site that contained skins, the first of which was the digideck archive which would become custo (also created by glenn)

Tib bit: during the end of the first incarnation of custo, an error caused everyone's user name to show up as glenn. As a practicle joke on modblog (possibly deskmod too), they did it on purpose. They set it in the code to go off on every April 1st. >;]

Btw, you will find a lot of history at Teknidermy. They have some way back interviews with site admins and such. The WayBackMachine has some stuff here and there too.

http://teknidermy.com/issues/
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Heh it's interesting to remember back to when ChangeMusic had custo - check out this news post from 2000 when they finally gave up and tried to sell the site for $500,000! http://web.archive.org/web/20001017182353/http://customize.o
rg/

The daily screenshot hadn't been changed for a year at this point, no news posted, and they'd put the site on a windows server which broke some of the code. Most people had left for DeskMod or Skinz, tho DM was up on eBay as they couldn't afford the hosting costs and Skinz was in eFront hell. Bad times for the skinning community!

Anyone got any stories from around that time? I was only an occasional visitor back then but i remember how bad things got when ChangeMusic took over.

I've added it to the history page along with some more of the links and info posted here (keep it coming :)

Ha, I remember those days pretty well.

You think there was problems recently with people disrespecting each other, back then if you sucked you were told so in very certain terms.

and you usually deserved it if you were uploading icq+ photoskins, or winamp photoskins. I rather miss the days of tearing into some kid who just put a picture from his favorite band into a winamp skin generator. *pine*

Photoskins in general. Or OS skins for that matter.

What is EVO?

we are EVO

EVO was the project codename for this website.

[ß)