Site History

Sandcastle V.I. started out in early 1996 as simply a Star Trek episode guide that I set up as a personal web site on the Compuserve Information Service. I had been a Compuserve member and had participated in its Science Fiction Forum since about 1986. This simple episode guide web site soon was being hosted on GeoCities (later becoming Yahoo! Geocities), and had sections with my unpublished book about the history of ships named Enterprise, some of my favorite auto racing teams, and a directory of manned space flights that I had been maintaining on index cards since the late 1960s. By then, I had begun calling the site Sandcastle Books on the Web. (Sandcastle Books was the name of the small company I had started to try to self-publish my Enterprise book.) By 1998, I had changed the name of the site to Sandcastle V.I. to remove the reference to "books" and had registered the URL www.sandcastlevi.com to go along with the new name. On January 1, 2003 the current (6th version) of the web site was launched. Of course, the look of Sandcastle V.I. has changed dramatically over the years. This latest version is, I believe, the most professional looking one to date, and I want to thank my daughter Selene for her efforts in designing the overall look and all of the header graphics and the great Flash animated splash page. The thumbnail graphics below show the site's development over the years.