I just found a link to http://sharingfirst.mit.edu and references to Tom Gray. However all of the references seemed old and the site isn’t responding to my repeated requests.
Can anyone tell me what this site was about and what it held?
Lots of FIRST members in the past had accounts on that site and posted things from their teams. There were mechanical designs, team information packets, student tests to be on drive teams, scouting sheets, website templates, sources for materials, etc. Tons of good stuff was hosted there, and it’s a shame that the website apparently isn’t active anymore. It was a good source of information before things like wikis became popular, back in 2000, 2001, and earlier.
If I’m not mistaken, I thought this was one of Woodie’s pet projects back in the day…
This was really useful before we had a thousand teams in FIRST. For instance, team 108 posted a system for doing right angle drives, as to mechanically counter-act the problem of 10% power loss in directional changes on the Drill motors. The 108ers back then posted CAD drawings and an entire run through of how and why it works, along with 3D renderings (BIG deal back then). FIRST has gotten too large to really make this useful.
I’m not sure why you say something like this isn’t useful anymore. How does the large size of FIRST reduce its effectiveness. Anyway, I can’t find the post right now, but after FIRSTwiki went up (in case you don’t know what it is, see the about page), Andy Baker said that it was very similar to some system that used to be hosted by MIT. I assume this is what he was talking about. So far, FIRSTwiki has had no trouble with the size of FIRST (in fact, we could sure use more contributors.)
Tom Gray was a master’s student at MIT. The site was his “final” project. It stayed up for a while after he finished his degree, but has since gone down. Others have sufficiently covered it’s contents.
To see the page as it was, here it is as of January 22, 2002 from the Wayback Machine. To see its progress over time, check it out here.