Where It Came From
Starting in 1999, the Samurai Archives Japanese history page was developed by C.E.West and F.W.Seal. R. Noelle, a friend of West's, was trying his hand at running a web server over his cable internet connection from his apartment, and offered to host a website. West, remembering the utter lack of useful internet sources on Japanese history during his thesis on Oda Nobunaga in 1997, thought that a Japanese history website would be a neat idea. At the time, Seal was more interested in WWII history, and declined for a time, but eventually came around.
The Original Plan
The website itself was not planned out per se - the unconscious intent was to just keep putting up information until there was just so much there, it would meld into a cohesive whole. That never really happened, and it eventually became more of a "Sengoku History" page, rather than an all encompassing Japanese history page. The assumption was that as the page grew, interest would grow as well, and we would find contributors eager to help out - in essence, the original thought was the same concept of a Wiki, however, at that time the software didn't exist, or if it did, we were not aware of it. Unfortunately, this concept never really came to fruition until the "Guest Articles" section was christened with the first article, Kawari Kabuto and the Great Warlords of the "Sengoku" by Augie Rodriguez. The section name was later changed to "Featured Articles", and articles by F.W.Seal were added, to make the section more comprehensive and directly related to the rest of the website. It wasn't until the addition of the Samurai Wiki in August of 2006 that the true potential and intent of this website could be reached.
The URLs
The Samurai Archives has been through a few URLs over the years. The original URL was essentially an IP address followed by ~kitsuno while it was hosted on R. Noelle's home server.
Because the traffic was getting to be too much, the website was moved to http://samurai.bigsitecity.com/ sometime in 2000. It was hosted there until the host server mysteriously crashed without warning in late July or early August of 2001. Because some images were not backed up, there was some irretrievable losses, including some clan kamon and genealogy images. Repeated attempts to contact the host (bigsitecity.com) got us nowhere, but since it was a free hosting site, there was not much we could do, so we moved yet again.
The next URL was http://www.angelfire.com/realm/kitsuno01/.