Owens Corning

About Us


History of HouseNet

For anyone who wonders how we started HouseNet, here's a quick history. Gene and I write books, articles, and columns about home repairs and remodeling. In the Spring of 1991, we created Homeline BBS as an extension of our writing. Gene's always been a tech-head so he was intrigued with starting a bulletin board system. I thought it would be great fun to meet other people online and talk about projects. It was a hobby we both shared. Since we had hundreds of articles about working on houses on disk we thought we'd offer them to others.

We bought a 2400 baud modem, hooked it up to a Toshiba portable with floppy disks and Gene set up our system. It was an inauspicious beginning set up in a spare bedroom. I guess because we were the only BBS with home improvement information, HouseNet received a lot of publicity. We were featured in many newspaper and magazine articles and with every story came more users. Our numbers grew slowly, but steadily. We changed the name to HouseNet and applied for a trademark to make it our own.

In early '94, a New York public relations exec helped us find an underwriter to support our launch to the Internet. The Owens-Corning folks were intrigued with HouseNet as the new online medium, seeing it as a way to provide home improvement information to homeowners and contractors. They helped us move to the Web in October of '94.

In the spring of '95, we learned America Online was looking for content providers so we applied to their Greenhouse Program. We were accepted as partners in their venture that foster entrepreneurs in the online world. We launched HouseNet on AOL on December 29, 1995 and our new and improved Web site went up on May 31, 1996. We continue to expand all our online sites with the latest and greatest home improvement information. It's just the beginning of a hobby gone wild.

By Katie Hamilton

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