About Rudy’s Corner

I’ve been “online” for more than two decades now. Hard to believe! My first computer was an 8088 PC “clone”, and I got ahold of a screaming-fast 1200 baud modem sometime around 1984 or 1985. At first, I could only dial into BBS systems to download games and other applications I was interested in. I subscribed to Compuserve at some point in 1986. After discovering their discussion forums in the late 80s, I was hooked, and I have used “Rudy” as my handle since then. Software improved, Windows took over from MS-DOS, and I soon had a helpful offline reader for the forums that really improved my participation.

But that would soon change. In about 1993 or so, we started hearing about the “internet”, and Compuserve would soon provide a gateway to it. From home, though, our local library had a modem pool with free internet access, and I took advantage of it. Before long, the web took over and would eventually starve Compuserve of its membership, to the point where the once-giant Compuserve was taken over by the new king of the hill, AOL.

In late 1995, Compuserve launched their “OurWorld” personal home pages for their subscribers. Back then, the web was a new experience for most computer users. Seeing an opportunity, I took it upon myself to provide an online home for a collection of jazz and Latin music reviews I’d written for our Music/Arts Forum on Compuserve, and the original Rudy’s Latin Corner was born. Soon, I had added a Tijuana Brass discography and made it part of a sub-section of my site called A&M Corner. That portion soon took on a life of its own, and my site moved among a couple of different hosts until I finally landed at a real hosting company in 1997, and then procured the rudyscorner.com and amcorner.com domains and split them into two sites.

Other projects I hosted on Rudy’s Corner caused me to drop the “Latin” from the name shortly after launch, and many of these other projects spun off onto their own separate websites. (See our Site Guide here for a complete list of the projects, and where they “live” now.) In time, Rudy’s Corner outgrew its usefulness, and A&M Corner had taken on a life of its own until it grew to become the internet’s original (and today, most popular) site devoted to A&M Records collectors. I had plans to revive Rudy’s Corner for a few years, and finally in late 2005, began to assemble what is now the current Rudy’s Corner, a home for any interesting articles I see fit to publish on the web.

The subject matter of Rudy’s Corner will focus on music, audio/video hardware, gaming, computing, food, cars, or any other topics I find interesting enough to write on.  I’m not committed to any time schedule for publishing articles, but will try to do at least one a week. In catch-up mode right now, I’m pasting a new article into the blog about once per day. Some articles may be “reprints” of what I post on A&M Corner, and vice versa.

Rudy’s Corner welcomes contributors as well! If you wish to join the staff at Rudy’s Corner and provide us with some articles, contact me via the A&M Corner Forum.

Due to spamming, we do not have a “comment” feature available on this site; registration is reserved for article contributors only.  If you have any comments about any of the articles posted here, they are best discussed in the forum over at A&M Corner: join up, start a discussion, and I’ll create a link to the forum thread from my original article.   Some articles will have companion threads posted on A&M Corner, and are accessed directly with a “Discuss” link at the bottom of each applicable post.

Finally…yes, we have advertising here. We run our own Amazon “Astore” that lets us hand pick items for our visitors to purchase. We also may feature Amazon links in our articles. And we also have other ads served by Google, which you’ll find on various pages within our site. Unfortunately, we need to pay the server bills, and our affiliate accounts help us reach our goal.

Thanks for visiting!