Website www.usabil.nu turns fiveteen

SWEDEN. First of December Usabil.nu will celebrate its 15th birthday! It all started with us using our company computer in our home to play solitaire. We searched for information on a Focus CD. Some people never found themselves behind a lit screen. Internet didn’t exist yet. Google was unknown. Heavens, Mats Carlsson was a quick starter! Read the founders own words about how everything got started but first: A flashback. By Lars-Åke Krantz. Translation Ellen Kay Krantz.

 

Company computers arrived around 1995. Swedish homes were computerized by the help of subsidies. People received 486:s with 4 Mb RAM and 420Mb hard drive through work to put in their homes. The one who chose the luxury package got a CD player with speakers.

Krantz, that didn’t belong to any company, bought one randomly.
– Price: 4500 $

Wasn’t even any talk about Internet. What would what be of any use for? One computer with Word and Excel and you had everything you ever will need. The encyclopedia Focus came with the purchase and you could also add the teaching travel game Backpacker if you wanted some extracurricular work.

The nuclear bomb recipe
All the Internet had to offer were nuclear bomb recipes and porn and that didn’t seem too appealing. But for the suspect patrons there was a 14:4 modem that could show one image if you waited  half a minute.

 

All URL was written by hand. No man used Google. WebCrawler was a popular search engine. Search engine, what’s that by the way?

Then came the Pentium processor and 28:8 modem and the debate whether Internet should be spelled with a capital “i”. Websites were something amazing that would make every mom-and-pop-shop in Norrbotten rich as they opened a window to the world. We understood nothing, opened a window to the “world” and the web hotels got rich instead.

Floppy discs and DOS. 

34 floppy discs were used for installing Windows 3:11 which was capable of showing us the World Wide Web. We visited each other to copy the discs. Occasionally you had to call 10.30 at night as the disc reader refused to cooperate.
– Have you got a healthy disc, number 17 Windows 3:11. Mine’s scratched.

SAS late ninety’s above and Amazon.com below.. Everything was a trial run. Error messages everywhere, booking travels with SAS was almost impossible.

Plug and play didn’t exist. Dose commands were used and to install a black/white matris printer took the whole night. Later on came Windows 95 on CD and NT and Windows 98. The screens grew huge on 17 squared inches and the CD burner came along that in some magic way could record and copy CD’s. That just sounded very criminal.

– And in this now, in this National computer darkness Mats created Usabil.nu !!!

How could you utilize usabil.nu?
It was something called a portal for USA cars, we thought. He had kind of, kind of didn’t have a “window on the Internet” for his shop as the mom-and-pop-store in Bjurtrask but more of a… Eehh, collected other peoples stuff… naa.. we didn’t get it. What would that be good for? A portal? What did that even mean?

Internet anyway isn’t for real? I mean, you can’t “drive to the portal” and take a look around. It’s a world of pretend and my friends’ computer has been out of order for six months now because he got some… virus?

Not the friend, talking about the computer!!

– That’s never gonna’ last, never mind becoming anything, we jumped around saying.

 In this environment Mats Carlsson created USAbil.nu. A pioneer, a precursor with foresight that understood the capacity way before we did. Read his own words about how it all came to be.

Christ, time sure fly by fast. 15 years… It was the first of December 1999 the website had its premiere.

The place
The idea first came to me on Siesta Key Beach outside of Sarasota, Florida where me and my family celebrated my 40th birthday.

I was launching on the beach, reading Autotrader, Deals on Wheels and some other ad magazines. The entrepreneur brain was in high gear as usual.

The idea
An online ad site for American cars, I could do that!

It was a done deal. When I returned home I contacted Magnus Ivarsson who’s a great at creating websites. He’d helped me before with a site for my real estate company, and he was interested in helping me out with this project.

Already in gear
Actually, this is how it first went down. At first, he made a website called sarasota.nu, because I was in contact with a Swedish real estate agent in Sarasota who wanted help with passing over speculator from Sweden to her in Florida. That partnership lasted until last year when she retired. Together we have successfully guided about thirty Swedes in buying houses in- and around Sarasota.

The name
However, back to Usabil.nu. I knew an important part of the site was the name. Surfed around on jankare.nu and amerikanare.nu and similar names, but felt strongest about usabil.nu. Actually, the name has become a concept. 15 years ago people said “jänkare” (Yankee) but nowadays “usabil” (USA car) is more frequently used.

Few adjustments
Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of what the site looked like from the get go in 1999, but if memory serves me right it was quite tame.
I had some requirements we still stick to, for example no rolling menus were you have to choose model and make etc. That irritates the crap out of me and has always done. The search should be as easy as possible to just simply type in what you are looking for.

No images
An ad has to include images. This sounds easy today but in 1999 not everyone had a digital camera. Camera phones didn’t even exist. So, how did you work that kink out? Well, the ones that didn’t have a digital camera sent me pictures which I then manually scanned and attached to the ad.

1st of December 1999
It was an exciting day, the first of December 1999. I sat by my desk, tapping my fingers in waiting for the first ads to arrive. The very first day ten ads arrived and it took off from there.
To spread the site I mailed lots of USA car clubs and also advertised in lots of magazines. The number of unique visitors rapidly increased and after one year the site had around 50 000 visitors every month.

New and exciting
We also got attention from daily newspapers and all of the leading car magazines during the first years. Power Magazine, Bilsport Classic and Wheels wrote articles about the site which gave a good shove in the statistics.
Radio Halland even paid a visit and did a 20 minute segment! Cool!!

Paper magazines have closed up shop
We cooperated with Motorborsen during many years. They had difficulties filling their ad space so they downloaded ads from Usabil.nu every Monday. We still have a similar arrangement with Bilsport Classic and Nostalgia. The fact that the Internet completely have taken over the ad market is a definite. Motorborsen has closed up shop and other ad departments in our car magazines still exists more out of tradition than anything else. If you are buying or selling a car today, you search the net.

Development
Usabil.nu has during the years developed into becoming a complete online portal for American cars. Ten years ago we started doing features, and during many years we did video features. You have been able to read the chronicles by Krantz for more than seven years and we also have the bulletin board where discussions have run high and low. Since many years back we have a steady stream of visitors, between 6000 and 9000 every day. That number varies depending on weekday.

15 years to come with usail.nu
We are constantly working towards pleasing our visitors in providing articles, bulletin board, news, shop and ads. We also try to on a personal lever respond to all emails within 24 hours.
Lets begin the next 15 years of fun!

 

Come along for the ride!
Mats Carlsson
Usabil.nu