The STArchive

D. Joseph Creighton’s The STArchive has been around pretty much since the beginning of the Internet and it is still online, one of the few original Star Trek websites that have survived.

Joseph told me earlier this month it was raw enthusiasm for starships that got the ball rolling.

Like a lot of kids, I loved them. I built models and drew blueprints and designed my own.

One summer, he and a friend rented all the episodes of The Original Series and took notes of ships and locations. That’s how what would become The STArchive got started.

They posted the lists to Usenet, the precursor to the modern Internet, and put them up for FTP somewhere in the late 1980s or early 90s. By 1994, Joseph had learned enough HTML to create a website.

The first version I can find in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is from February 1999, but the site had already been online for five years by then. It only ever underwent one major design change, in August 2004.

Joseph dutifully kept his lists up-to-date for about two decades, but he balked at attempting to catalog the Star Trek reboots and Discovery.

“I remember the pain of attempting to note all the CGI ships in Deep Space Nine,” he told me.

Although I enjoyed the hobby, I was quite happy to let others take the reins with their own enthusiasm and love for the Star Trek universe.

You can now find more comprehensive lists of ships and locations, with far more detail, elsewhere, but Creighton was the one who pioneered it.

My site only survives to this day because I work in IT and have a soft spot for retaining useful information and not breaking links.