the long version (and I'm gonna sticki it this time...lol)
Bought my first FJ40 in 1989, and did mud drag racing with it....after a couple years of fun, I got tired of cleaning the truck and finding places where the mud just seemed to never get cleaned from...and would usually glop on your face during maintenance and repairs....the IH8MUD license plate was born in September 1992 (and yes, I still have that plate, with the year tag, on the garage wall)
I also started getting online around that time, on the old ORML (OffRoad Mailing List, hosted by Stefan Roth at GaTech.edu)...a few years later, around 1996ish, the LCML (Land Cruiser Mailing List) was started by Gary Bjork...during this time, I was collecting tech link url's from projects around the world, as people were doing online writeups. Folks would post on the LCML looking for advice, and I frequently had a bookmark in my personal browser that I would then post up so they could see what others had done.
In 1997ish, I thot it would be nice to have these links all collected in one place online, rather than just in my own browser....so I started my own personal web page on vbe.com/~woody/ and had buildups of my own rig as well as the initial links that now create
http://www.ih8mud.com/cruisertech.php
In September 2000 I bought the IH8MUD.com domain and re-directed the site into a more general Cruiser tech idea
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ih8mud.com - it was hosted free by a friend who was starting up OffroadHQ.
As folks read these tech writeups, they often assumed that since I linked them I had also written them...and the emails and questions got overwhelming...sometime around January 2002, the Forum began (in June 2002, the forum had 372 topics and 1459 posts). The site went thru a few changes and growing pains...it was hosted by OffroadHQ for about a year, by Birfield.com for about 9 months (during which the forum broke away in mid-2003 to a separate host), and finally in December 2003 to the dedicated server setup we use presently, all hosted by American Hosting in Reno NV.
From a logo standpoint, the IH8MUD.com image was created by Brian Goudie (Chemical442) in April 2003...the vehicle line drawings have been added over time.
<more coming>