After graduating from Purdue University (1988), David Whittemore remained as an employee. With his position came valuable connectivity to The Internet.

Whenever the JBC came to The States, Whittemore would take time off to follow parts of their tours, acting as ad-hoc photographer, taper of shows, and trying not to get underfoot.

Whittemore set up and ran the Jazz Butcher electronic mailing list between 1989 and 2003 - until the SPAM became overwhelming.

The mailing list was home to many of the familiar names participating in online JBC conversations to this day.

March 20th, 1994.

That's, to our best estimate, when this youngish programmer sitting in an office at Purdue University realized that the new "World Wide Web" thing he'd been playing with for a few months was something that was made, not just consumed.

And so, absent any proper framework with which to develop a website, David Whittemore - like all other "webmasters" at that time - had to cobble together some technology that would spit out HTML to browsers.

David's invention to do this was called HTDB. Scratching the same need as the PHP language, which was also starting development about this time, PHP was shared with the world and became a de-facto standard. HTDB was not, and it remained a "toy language" - used only by its creator and a few friends.

The original Jazz Butcher website was hosted at a ridiculous purdue.edu sub-domain URL, and consisted of mailing list information and other tidbits that David and others had collected to that point. He was also in postal mail contact with Pat at that time, and those shared letters were a highlight of the site.

The Jazz Butcher website was one of the first 1,000 in the world.

Things hummed on for a few years in this mode.

Creation... Black Eg... Sumosonic... Wilson... The (not so) Final Gig...

For a short while, the Jazz Butcher website content was hosted in a section of Whittemore's "adjective.com" domain.

In approximately 1999, Gary McBride shocked sensibilities by registering the "jazzbutcher.com" domain. Thankfully, this was done in an effort to prevent it from falling to domain squatters.

With the new (named) home, the JBC archives evolved to be a place where gigs were announced, documented, commented-upon. Fans contributed photos, stories and recordings. People commented and Pat replied.

Myspace... Face***/Meta...

The Jazz Butcher website chugs on.

McBride picked up the registeration bills (thanks!) until the domain was transferred to Whittemore in 2021.

HTDB still is used to spit out the JBC website, but there are better ways these days to create websites.

Whittemore wants to "free the data".

Media will be eventually moved to archive.org, website content will be in structured JSON.

Breaking things down to those pieces will allow the JBC archives to be freely shared and remixed by future conspirators.