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The Real History of TC and EB\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Intro by TC<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Darcy (EB) wrote this in 2008 \u2014 I cannot being to tell you how much things have changed over the last fourteen years \u2014 but our history is still the same. We hope you all enjoy this little trip back to the beginnings of Cloudeight when EB and TC first met. (TC 8\/03\/2022)<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Real History of TC and EB by Darcy (EB)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n We have had many ask us to tell the story about how Thundercloud and I met and how we developed Cloudeight\u2026 so the story begins.<\/span><\/p>\n It all started in a land far, far away.. well, actually it started in Michigan when I met my friends Orca and Ldy on the old IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Michigan Chat lines. We had a regular group of people who came to chat. Then sometime in 1996, TC came snooping around one day… even though he was not from Michigan! It made him stand out, so naturally, I began chatting with him. He was making a web page and was a newbie, so I took him under my wing, shared all my store of knowledge from the two months I had accumulated, and taught him how to put some images on a page. We started emailing and chatting about new things we were learning, and found that both of us were eager to learn all we could! Wow.. a cyber match made in heaven!<\/span><\/p>\n OK… on with the story. One day I was searching the web for something new I had just learned called \u201cscripts\u201d and set out to learn them inside out. I was playing around with one of these scripts (a script simply automates something) and it made my picture appear to be scrolling. Wow! Something really cool! I sent it in an email to TC and asked him if he could \u201csee\u201d anything. I was not sure if only I could view this scrolling picture or not!<\/span><\/p>\n He was as excited as I was.. instead of just answering me to say yes or no, I had to wait all day and my answer finally came.. he had created a nice graphic of his own (using skills he had obtained from the one and only\u2026 !) and had it scrolling away! We couldn\u2019t believe something like this could be done on the computer, much less in email! We wanted to tell our friends about this.. so off we went, emailing our friends our new discovery.<\/span><\/p>\n We found our friends were just as excited about our new discovery, and soon they were asking how to do this. We tried to explain, though it seemed so complicated, especially for those that didn\u2019t understand scripting or those that did not work in PSP\/Photoshop, so we \u201cmade\u201d a \\stationery for them and send it to them in email. They would in turn click reply, remove all the text, change who they were sending to, and were sending their \u201cown\u201d stationery. It was a roundabout way of doing things, but it worked, so our circle of friends were having fun along with us now!<\/span><\/p>\n Soon the requests got overwhelming\u2026 and we just couldn\u2019t find the time to send stationery to everyone! So, TC and I decided to make a website page for our friends to download the stationery we had made. We created it from any pictures we thought were nice and soon we had 10 or 15 people a day coming to our new website. We were ecstatic when it hit 20! Twenty people in one day! We couldn\u2019t believe all the traffic!<\/span><\/p>\n When we weren\u2019t chatting, we were creating! We would spend days working on a single stationery design. sometimes editing an image one pixel at a time to get it to tile perfectly. I remember letting \u201cthe little things\u201d go, like the dishes and the laundry so I could create!\u00a0 We put our hearts into every single creation, and couldn\u2019t wait to show each other what we’d done. Then up to the web, it would go! Lucky for us, Thundercloud had his very own domain\u2026 it was empty so we had a great place to put our stationery! Cloudeight had not yet been born.. but soon would be and its home would be on Thundercloud.net.<\/span><\/p>\n Our next step was to come up with a name for our site. We pondered on this for days, tossed names back and forth, but nothing sounded \u201cright\u201d, until one day we mentioned something about being on cloudnine and how nice it was.. and it hit me.. let’s combine our names.. (or part of our names!) and call our site Cloudeight! A step back from \u201cbeing on cloudnine\u201d but better! And finally.. a name that clicked and after all these years we are still known as Cloudeight. This explains why Cloudeight’s home is on thundercloud.net!<\/span><\/p>\n Jump ahead to today, we have a mailing list for our stationery and tech news with over 200,000 members, and while we have created many new sites and products since then, our stationery site remains our biggest site with nearly 10,000 visitors daily and more than double that amount during holidays and winter season.<\/span><\/p>\n An Afterword by TC<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It has been fourteen years since EB wrote this. Little did we know in 2009 – one year later – we would find our dream shattered by Microsoft and the introduction of Windows 7. Windows 7 brought an end to Outlook Express and its sister Windows Mail. <\/span><\/p>\n Our stationery, designed for these two great email programs, was about to become unusable by those who moved to Windows 7. Microsoft decided not to include an email client in Windows 7 then offered Windows Live Mail (part of Windows Live Essentials) as an alternative. But Windows Live Mail was a resource-hungry, flaky program, noted for being buggy. We tried desperately to find a way to make our stationery for Windows Live Mail \u2014 and Thunderbird \u2014 but it just wasn\u2019t the same… no scrolling, no music. These email clients allowed little more than backgrounds in email \u2014 and that\u2019s not Cloudeight stationery, at least not to us.<\/span><\/p>\n Our mailing lists \u2013 once over 200,000 gradually shrunk as more people started using Windows 7, our stationery, once the lifeblood of our business, slowly faded away until only a small number of people used it.<\/span><\/p>\n For many of the past 14 years, we have struggled financially. There were times we wondered if we\u2019d make it through the next month. We existed week-to-week \u2013 and as I\u2019m sure many of you know, that isn\u2019t fun.<\/span><\/p>\n When things were good, Darcy and I got along famously \u2014 we constantly shared new ideas and had a lot of fun with our work and our site. But things became deadly serious when we struggled to make ends meet. We took 50% pay cuts to keep things going. We worked harder, got paid less, and seemed to get nowhere.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2011 we started Cloudeight Direct Computer Care Services (Darcy’s idea) and things started looking up a bit. Cloudeight Direct takes a lot of our time because we are the kind of people who always want to do the very best we can for everyone. To this day, we try to treat each computer that we work on as if it were our own \u2014 and sometimes we are too fussy and take a lot longer than we should with each customer… and we would not have it any other way.<\/span><\/p>\n To say the problems we\u2019ve endured over the years haven’t affected our partnership and our friendship wouldn’t be true. It’s really been hard for us both. I tend to be hot-headed and temperamental while Darcy is ever the diplomat. So I guess I made it harder on her than it should have been \u2014 Heaven knows it’s been a long, rough road.<\/span><\/p>\n I am not an easy person to get along with \u2014 I\u2019m very high-strung and lash out too often when things don\u2019t go well. I\u2019m impatient and I can be condescending and gruff \u2014 but like Darcy, I too have a heart of gold and I am compassionate \u2014 I just don\u2019t show it as well as Darcy does.<\/span><\/p>\n But… there is one thing, more than any other, which has gotten us through the thundering rapids of decline \u2014 and that is you. Those of you who have made donations, purchased one of our products or services, or used our Cloudeight Direct Computer Care Services are the reason we\u2019re still here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Without all of you, Cloudeight would have fallen into that vast sea of dead websites, long ago –\u00a0 abandoned, and long forgotten. All we would have left would be good memories \u2014 because \u201c\u2026what\u2019s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n So we both sincerely thank every single one of you who stuck with us.\u00a0 We appreciate you more than you know.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Real History of TC and EB\u00a0 Intro by TC Darcy (EB) wrote this in 2008 \u2014 I cannot being to tell you how much things have changed over the last fourteen years \u2014 but our history is still the same. We hope you all enjoy this little trip back to the beginnings of Cloudeight when\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23996"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24005,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23996\/revisions\/24005"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}