On April 29, 2024, we are one year old! What an age, the 140 has been discontinued for 24 years, where have we been? But our number is nothing to be ashamed of…
Ten years ago, I had built first 140 website in late 2014, I think it was called mb-140.org. It was more like a counterpart of Christian’s mb-w140.de. Since 1999, mb-w140.de has always been the greatest 140 website, not one of them. It has the quick answers you need on almost every aspects, I still rely on it to this day.
Honestly after all the building, I had no idea why it was needed —— not much new content, so it ceased operations in late 2015.
Outside of there, I also discovered a lot of interesting things with Christian. A few years ago I suggested that maybe we should write a book. That’s a great proposal, but the thing is, none of us are retired, and 140 isn’t our job. So, the draft and some chapters were ready, but not enough time to fill in. The vast majority of time was paid into interviews with Mercedes-Benz veterans, I clearly recongnise without those, there would be no book. At least a book I would paid for.
In the process of summarizing these interviews and research, I realized that I needed a portable library. mb-w140.de can already provide a lot of information, and I also have my own online research system, but they are not enough. I need a platform to put knowledge at my fingertips. Imagine how awkward it would be to carry around a hard drive or laptop. Even if they are stored in the cloud, the formatting of word and text documents looks so boring. It just reminds me: Look, you are lonely, you only deserve interface like this!
We need a decent browsing interface that at least doesn’t let down the people who take the time to be interviewed. As my research progresses, I become less optimistic about the future of books, but time keeps ticking for veterans. Let’s assume that the main development ended in 1991. Even for a 23-year-old engineer, he is now close to retirement! The reality is that most engineers were over 40 years old when they celebrate the birth of 140. They left us forever.
As a result, some interviews are being gradually released. If we run out of new content by the time the book comes out, I don’t care. You see, who would be willing to pay a hefty printing fee for information that is available for free on the Internet? At least I don’t. Books today function more like secrets, you have to pay to get something that is exclusive, not available elsewhere. So if one day the limited mineral reserves are exhausted, I will notify all website subscribers at that time, maybe you don’t need my book!
On April 29, 2023, the first article was published. Gradually, weekly updates became the norm. I’ve written as much as I can over the past year, anyway I think I’ve missed a few. This is not my preferred approach, because interesting discoveries don’t happen every week, and I’m not in the mood to write weekly. What is there to look forward to when it is destined to happen? So I take breaks when I really don’t want to continue. Writing has definitely taken up a lot of my time over the past year. Despite having written for the automotive press and museums, I’m a bad writer. I don’t know why an article that only takes 10 minutes to read takes me 4 hours to write.
But I owe it. Who do I owe? Things that were important to it, like my passion, or people reaching out, all kinds of matters. If there is a God watching all this, he will definitely ask, why haven’t you done anything yet? I should have written it a long time ago. Christian and I discussed many interesting topics, but unfortunately we did not have a secretary to write memos until I forgot what we talked about. Therefore, in the research of the past year, there is not even anything new that was produced during this year. I just wrote down my thoughts from a long time ago. I have calculated that even if I stopped receiving any new information from now on, I could still write the weekly for more than 20 years.
In the past year, I wrote 43 new articles. Like I said, there were a few days that were skipped. I try to make each article more documentary, so they’re not skimpy on length. There are also 4 older articles that I once wrote to myself. There were probably only 4 articles in 6 years. It can be seen that it is a good incentive to publish these words in a much more decent form than Word. Even if I am not so active in periodic writing, at least I am eager to see how these words and pictures are arranged together. Of course, there are still some unfinished drafts. Overall we didn’t have much stock, we were on a train that needed to lay our own rails, we had to take a break of two weeks at most before having to start writing again.
Apart from these articles, other achievements are some simple statistics and some feature public archive. And of course, there’s the website itself. I’m not a programmer and I hate programming, so I’m happy with the current structure. At this point, the richness of the site may still be disappointing. This site is not trying to be an encyclopedia about the 140, you can already find a lot on mb-w140.de. Therefore, some of the existing directories are currently empty, and I’m still hesitant to continue building them.
To sum up, the original intention of establishing this website is just an online research archive, so that I can continue my research anytime and anywhere. I can check what I need on my phone on the subway and in the restroom, which is important. Then, I hope to attract more people with the same interests. Over the past year, and two years of running Instagram, I’ve definitely met some important people. I don’t expect this site to be very popular as the 140 study will only interest a few people. This website is a reminder to me and God: we are not wasting our time.