[CQ-Contest] Origin of 3830 Score Reporting

[jpescatore at aol.com]

Others have already predated my memories of 3830, which go back to the late 1980s when operating at W3LPL. As soon as the clock hit 0000Z on Sunday night, we would start packing up the TS-830s we brought to Frank's place and someone would put the 80M position on 3830. 
Someone (often me, because I was doing the PVRC newsletter and would include the scores) would scribble down the scores as we waited to see how we did against the N2/K1 competition. Month's later the scores would show up in the old folded letter sized paper NCJ...
Later on I did a "Digital Contesting" or something like that column for NCJ and Internet email starting to become ubiquitous - well, in use a lot by those in technical fields.  I (WB2EKK at the time) put together an contester Internet email list and George WB5VZL and Trey WN4KKN put together what became the start of CQ-CONTEST.
I did what the Japanese call the "long QRX" between the mid 1990s and 2009 or so, as family and work took over life. When I got back on 3830scores.com was there and amazing - and gotten so much more amazing since then, kudos to WA7BNM.
Since QST stopped printing line scores, 3830 is the first and often only place most people see their scores in comparison to anyone else. 
If you bicycle or run, you  probably use the Strava web site, which is kind of the 3830scores for competitive racing that has filtered down to the more casual runners/cyclists who like to track their times. The major difference is Strava takes essentially the ".adif file" as input. vs. just ride summary data, and produces all kinds of statistics under a "freemium" model. 
As NCJ looks at electronic distribution, Strava would be a good model to explore.
73 John K3TN