1994-1995
While working at the University of Michigan, Justin talked the folks in the Electrical Engineering/Computer Science department into hosting the experimental Slackware Linux instances comedy.eecs.umich.edu and improv.eecs.umich.edu via static IPs over a 1200-baud dial-up modem. The modem remained but the 386-based computer that was productivity.org replaced comedy & improv.
1996
After leaving Ann Arbor to run the network and computers for a small rural ISP in Galesburg, Illinois, productivity.org moved to T1 connectivity and upgraded to early Pentium hardware.
While there, productivity.org hosted TmySQL, the first MySQL library for Borland Delphi (Objective Pascal).
1999
The ISP business of Missing Link Communications was bought out by Madison River Communications, based in North Carolina.
productivity.org moved to recycled Compaq desktop hardware and remained in Galesburg, Illinois at its Chamber of Commerce Visitor's Center.
2001-2009
Justin left the ISP world and entered the world of finance at Firstar Bank; productivity.org switched to a custom 4U rack-mount server was moved to Peoria, Illinois, hosted at Heart Communications.
During this time, two Java-based projects were created and hosted on productivity.org: Habitat4j to solve complicated deployment issues while Justin worked at U.S. Bank and Syslog4j to robustly handle network logging.
2010-2013
The sweet deal at Heart Communications came to a close; productivity.org switched to SuperMicro server-class hardware and moved to Joe's Data Center in Kansas City, Missouri. At this point, it was a VMware guest on a VMware Server 2.0 host.
2014-Present
Hosted at Cybercon in St. Louis, Missouri, productivity.org is now a VMware instance on a blade with VMware ESXi 6.5.
2019
Continuing with the tradition of learning-by-doing, the productivity.org site was developed by Mobirise and hosted on a Debian/Docker instance on the blade server. Special thanks to Let's Encrypt project for the SSL certificate.
The Habitat4j project was moved to GitHub.
2023
A bit late to the game, but all key resources related to productivity.org are now available via IPv6.