Electronics Infoline.
Launched in October 2000. Twenty-six years later it is still online, still free, and still run by one person.
Electronics Infoline went live in October 2000, as a resource for electronics engineers and hobbyists — circuit references, component information, and the kind of practical material that was hard to find on the web at the time. It was the first thing I built, and it is the reason everything after it exists.
It is still there. Not archived, not parked, not sold — online, at the same domain, twenty-six years after it launched. The Internet Archive's first capture of it is dated 18 October 2000, and it has been captured there several hundred times since, which is the only kind of longevity claim I think is worth making: one anybody can check without asking me.
Along the way it gathered a community of more than 371,000 followers on Facebook. I have never run it as a business. It has no paywall and no login, and for long stretches it has simply sat there being useful, which is a thing I have come to value more than growth.
On the Nasdaq MarketSite Tower.
Seven storeys of screen on the corner of Broadway and 43rd, and a site run from India on the front of it.
What the banner actually says
You can read it in the photograph: "Nasdaq Corporate Solutions welcomes Electronics Infoline to our GlobeNewswire Distribution Network." GlobeNewswire is Nasdaq's press-release distribution wire, and the Tower banner is how they welcome a company onto it. It is not an award, and Nasdaq was not passing judgement on my work.
I say that plainly because the alternative is worse. It would be easy to describe this as a distinction and hope nobody reads the banner — but the banner is right there in the picture, at seven storeys, and being caught dressing it up would cost more than the claim is worth.
Here is what I do think is worth noticing. It was not an advertising buy: I did not purchase that placement. And in 2017 a company with no US office, no US staff and no US legal entity — one person, working from India — was distributing its news through Nasdaq's own wire and ended up on a screen in midtown Manhattan. That happened. It is a smaller claim than the one I could have made, and unlike that one, it is true.
- 2000Online since
- 26Years continuous
- 371,000+Facebook followers
- 1Founder
What came after
The habit Electronics Infoline started — build something useful, keep it online, keep improving it — is the one I have repeated ever since. NineClip Free Tools is a set of free calculators for GST, income tax, EMI and more, with no account needed. NineClip Build is a set of free construction cost calculators for India. CorrectForm helps people preparing Indian government-exam applications get their documents into the right format.
Today I run AuditMedic, which builds websites for US small businesses that search engines and AI assistants can both find and understand. In India the same work runs as NineClip Design. It is a separate company and a separate brand; the through-line is only that the same person is building it.
The longer version of the story is on the about page, and the fastest way to reach me is the contact page.
