Back in 1990. We attended an antique tractor auction held in New Paris , Indiana by Dennis Polk. This auction is held annually on Labor Day weekend. We happened to notice that well over half of the people in attendance appeared to be less than 50 years of age. This got us to wondering what this antique tractor thing was all about. 

Generally, our thoughts up until that time was that the people "tinkering" around with old tractors and gas engines were just a bunch of the older people who grew up with tractors & engines and were simply having fun again. We thought that they were just getting together and reminiscing about the past with some of this old stuff. 

So then, when we were at the auction and saw all those younger people there, it suddenly dawned on us that this antique tractor thing must be attracting a whole lot more interest than we had originally thought. 

Having grown up on a farm myself, this started me to begin paying a little more attention to what was really happening here. I surmised that younger people wanted to be attached to this collecting of tractors and engines to take themselves back to their younger years too..... or that they were looking at these pieces of equipment for an investment. 

At this particular time (back in 1990), I was just getting started with computers and how to work with them. I was wondering just how a computer network might be able to help these antique tractor and engine buffs to find parts when they needed them. So, we began to do some investigating on what it would take to run a Special Interest Bulletin Board. 

To make a long story short, we made a lot of phone calls and mailed a lot of letters, gathered a lot of names and data, put them into a database, and began to wonder what to do with it all. Most of this data was information of items for sale or things people were looking for. 

We found some inexpensive BBS Software that was self maintaining and began to learn how to become a "Sysop". The information that we had accumulated was categorized and put on the BBS in 1991. We ran that BBS up until 1995, when we began to get interested in the Internet. 

This BBS, which we called FASTRAC, had some limited success but never really took hold like we had hoped for (people just didn't want to pay long distance phone charges for logging on to a remote computer - can't blame them). When the Internet began to become so popular, the idea of reviving the FASTRAC concept into a home page began to materialize. This site is the direct result of our decision to revive the old BBS in a new and more graphical way than we could have ever achieved with the old BBS format. 

We hope you will enjoy some of the things that we have to offer, and that you come back soon (and often). If you have suggestions, comments, things you would like to see, let us know. 

Dave Haynes 
dave@adeptr.com