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The History of NukeWorker.com

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Rennhack:
NukeWorker was founded on April 19th, 1999 by Michael Rennhack, a Radiological Engineer who has been in the nuclear business for two decades.  He had always been fond of computers, starting in 1982 at the age of 11 with his Commodore 64.  Michael quickly modified the C-64 and used it as an electronic bulletin board system (BBS), where other people in town would call his computer with theirs and send email or exchange messages on the bulletin board.  He ran this electronic community, known as “The Great Wall” until his nuclear career took him on the road in 1992, at which time the great wall fell.

Three years later, Windows 95 and the Pentium chip were released.  1995 was also the year that internet explorer and the Internet gained popularity.  Michael purchased one of these new machines and started learning how it worked.  In January of 1997, Michael produced his first website, Rennhack.net, which contained small pages containing information about his interests, which at the time was collecting Zippo lighters, Martial Arts, and his nuclear career.  He monitored the popularity of each page, and noticed that the nuclear sections were getting all of the attention, so he focused on improving that portion of his site.

Over the next two years, Michael continued his work on the nuclear section of his site until it would no longer fit on his Rennhack.net site which was hosted for free.  So he purchased the domain name NukeWorker.com, which was inspired by the AOL user name of a fellow nuke worker named Bob Reece (R.I.P.).

NukeWorker.com went online April 19th, 1999 with the mission of enriching nuclear workers lives and instantly gained a following of over 200 people the first day. The number has been growing ever since.  In 2004, NukeWorker.com received more than 6.5 million page views a month.

In 2002, the server bills for NukeWorker.com had increased by more than tenfold, and had become a financial burden for Michael who was offering all of the sites services for free.  So NukeWorker was established as a corporation, and started accepting fees for advertising, outage schedules and job postings.  Eighty percent of NukeWorker’s bills were paid for by those donations and fees which were at one time free services.  The other 20 percent was paid out of Michael’s pocket.  In 2004 Michael established a “Nuclear Pride Shop” that sold shirts, hats, and stickers which helped with another 10% of the bills and started a grass roots marketing program.  In 2006 online OSHA training was added under popular demand.

In 1999, NukeWorker had a simple logo; it was just a magenta tri-foil with the text ‘NukeWorker.com’ over top.  In 2001 the ‘classic’ orange and green NukeWorker character in a bubble suit holding a can with the nuclear symbol on it was born.  In 2003 the NukeWorker logo underwent a slight transformation from the classic logo to the blue logo we know today.

From 1999 to 2004, NukeWorker was marketed as the nuclear community it was born, expounding on the 5,500 pictures in the photo gallery, thousands of questions in the free online quizzes, 60,000 messages in the forum, hundreds of jobs in the job board, the nuclear news section that was updated hourly, the nuclear pride store, and the massive facility information section.  These features made NukeWorker the most popular destination on the internet for nuclear workers.  However, NukeWorker was known by everyone other than its founder simply as a ‘job board’, a favorite destination for nuclear employers and job seekers.  Michael analyzed the websites income, and noticed that the job board was responsible for 40% of the sites revenue from 2002-2005.  The site was reorganized to be more employer friendly in late 2005, and was marketed as the nuclear job site it really was.  In 2007, the job board portion of the site accounted for 70% of the websites revenue.

MrHazmat:
MR  He's a bad mother...... shut my mouth, but I'm talking about MR, He's the best.  ;)

You Da Man!

radrat:
well there ya have it folks
Im sure a lot of people have wondered how MR and Nukeworker.com got started. Please get the next chaper out .

Does the term "you have come a long way baby" mean anything.

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