The history of pothos
Thomas William-Powlett created pothos.co.uk around September 1994 after a trip to Turkey. He quickly realised that he knew very little about Alexander compared with the people who frequented the site. He is a Science teacher who became an IT consultant and then returned to teaching in 2004. He is fascinated by ancient history, and has travelled widely in Europe and Africa looking for Ancient ruins.
"I started this 'page' in 1994, when it truly was a page. One page of information about Alexander the Great. I am often asked why I did it. The simple answer is that 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' - after all, if you want to learn about a new technology, you have got to choose a subject, and it came down to 'Alexander' or 'skiing'.
The complicated answer is that my father embarrassed me once (we were standing outside Mycenae) when he realised that although I had heard of Alexander, I had no idea he was factual or what he had done. Thus followed an intensive period of reading, followed by various pilgrimages (Greece, Turkey, Egypt) to where Alexander had once stood. When wanting to learn HTML (remember, in 1994 Netscape didn't have version numbers, the browser of choice was 'Cello' and internet explorer was a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye) I wanted a subject that would teach me more than just HTML. So there you go. I am no expert. The other authors of the site are much more qualified.”
Thomas now rarely adds information to the site, but tries to keep the functionality up to speed.
About pothos.org - where did we come from?
Alexander's pothos.org started life hidden on an educational web site in 1994. It was the first web page dedicated to Alexander the Great, beating the second by about two months. In those days, images were an innovation in Netscape 2.0.
This site is maintained by a team of volunteers. All share a peculiar fascination with the Ancient King.
Everybody is invited to join the lively and busy Forum. It has been the beating heart of pothos.org ever since it was created in 1998. Feel free to post your questions and viewpoints, no matter if you are new to the subject or have been a long time student of history. Rest assured your fellow Forum members tend to be friendly, helpful and open minded.
In 2007, the site started to suffer from a series of server outages. Initially these were largely due to the (then) host brinkster.com who were hacked and had to change all the user passwords - without informing the clients that this would knock out the applications on the servers! By September brinkster was going seriously downhill and one of the tables in the database behind the forum was corrupted. This was painstakingly reconstructed but the time had come to move. The entire web site was updated and copied over to the new server in September (big thanks to Vergina Sun who did a majority of the content copying). The new web site is much more future proof, secure and reliable. The future of pothos.org is safe!
Thank you for your interest in pothos.org.