This site began simply as a fascination with my first REAL guitar, my Aria Pro II CS-350. I wasn’t sure what I had but I did know it was something quite special and was curious about the maker. Somehow I stumbled upon the name Matsumoku and an obsession was born. The site began as a simple collection of pages containing any information I could find on Matsumoku which eventually spiraled out of control. Back then your ISP gave you a little web space with your account with which you could put up a handful of personal pages of your own. Before long I had outgrown the allotted 25 megabytes allowed (a LOT back then) and in 2001 decided to take the plunge and register a domain name and secure hosting. Therathole.org was born. There I created a directory, quite simply named “guitars” and began building an archive of the information I had come across. In a stroke of luck I decided to also set up forums in the hopes others like me were out there. I had NO idea what I was in for! One became two, became four, became ten and it began to take on a life of its own growing exponentially.

As the number of “members” grew so did the information. Back then HTML was for the most part hand coded but I did cheat and use a simple HTML editor to create the page skeletons (tables, layout, etc.) fleshing them out by hand. Although I had programmed in the past in AS400, Commodore Basic, IBM ROM Basic, QuickBasic and Visual Basic I knew nothing of HTML so it was quite the learning experience to say the least.

In time it grew to hundreds of pages with new information pouring in. It remained in this archaic state for a number of years. Bear in mind when the Guitar Gallery was created the standard computer display resolution was 640×480 with a few rich folks who could afford 800×600 so the site was formatted for this. As with all things though there is a beginning, a middle and an end.

Around 2018 or a little later Google started aggressively pushing for mobile compatibility and began adding lines to their results in bold red letters “Not mobile friendly”, primarily because the links were too small for fingers and meant for a mouse pointer. This forced me to abandon the old layout so when I retired in 2021 I also retired the old layout at the same time. I easily spent a month working from the time I woke until it was time for bed converting all the old content into WordPress. Thousands of images to convert, hundreds of HTML pages to convert and combine into PDFs. There were a few that were unhappy but at least Google was no longer punishing me and “phone people” got their responsive layout. 🙂

The forums were running phpBB and already responsive but the old pages simply had to go away. I still have the old layout archived on an old external backup drive and every now and then look at it remembering how it all began. Some of you may remember the humble beginnings. Most are new to the site and will never know how long or how far this site has come over the years. The forums are still here but due the amount of work involved in thwarting spammers and hackers it is now archived but fully searchable. Some of it was lost when it was hacked and ultimately crashed some years ago but the majority of it still remains.