The Origin

I've spent most of my career working in a network engineering capacity of some sort.  One side effect of this is that one tends to collect stuiff that may or may not be reusable in some fashion such as cables, connectors, adapter cards, nuts, bolts, screws, and whatever.

For a number of years, I kept a big cardboard box in the corner of my office where I would accumuilate this network-related detritus.  Somewhere along the line, the box became known as "HR's Big Box."  It gained a reputation as a place where someone could quickly find an item that they needed for use in a test setup in our network engineering lab and/or as a spare to replace a failed component.  It also became the equivalent of the "Elephant's Graveyard" for older hardware and software items that were no longer used in our production networks, but still had some useful life in a lab environment.

The Transition

The original Big Box was retired long ago, but it's succesor lives on as this bit of trivia. It has been availablle to the masses since 1997 via the ubiquitous network of networks known as the Internet.  It is no longer a dumping ground for network stuff.  Rather. it is a virtual Big Box of stuff that everyone accumulates over the years, i.e., stuff  that one has absolutely no reason to keep other than functioning as space eaters and/or  dust gatherers.

The Future

No crystal balls available here, so your guess is as good as mine.

The Technology

The Internet version of the Big Box started out as a few static web pages containing a mix of HTML and very basic Javascripts.  It evvolved over the years to what you see here.

The current incarnation of HR's Big Box uses LAMP as its base software plaform, with the GetSimple Content Managment System (CMS), the Plogger Gallery and some custom PHP and Javascripts developed by HR.