Bay Area Collectors Association History
1971 BAMCA was founded April 15, 1971. It was originally a chapter of the Matchbox Collectors Club, but persisted long after that entity disappeared.
1994 The website was started. Originally it was just a list of links to other websites, but one year Matchbox announced their new lineup in advance, and we thought it would be cool to show it on the site. Things snowballed from there.
1996 1996 was the 25th anniversary of the club. We did a special club model that year, where we took the Matchbox Originals Bedford Van and put different decals on it.

This was also when we got the official approval to use the Matchbox logo on the website.

In December, an article was published in the Palo Alto Weekly about one of our club members.

1998 We bought the domain name. Real work began on creating a comprehensive information site about Matchbox Toys. Most of the scripting was written in PERL.

In December, an article was published in the New York Times that mentioned one of our club members.

2000 The entire site was converted to Python.
2004 The entire site was rewritten again to create a web framework and use a more cohesive design.
2010 In 2009 an effort was begun to convert the site to run off a MySQL database. This work completed in 2010. There are still some old pages that run off of text files, but almost everything that has to do with 3-inch models is in the DB.

We also added a FaceBook page. Feel free to "like" it!

2014 At this point all the scripts that run the site were put into GitHub. Anyone who is intereted in seeing this can contact us for more information.
2015 The site was rewritten (again!) to use the Jinja2 rendering engine. This nakes much of the site simpler and easier to maintain.
2016 All new pictures added to the site started being posted to our tumblr account.
2017 Photographer credits were added to the site. As the photographers were identified, credits were added to the pictures.
2018 A blog was added to the site, for announcing website changes, meets, and other club milestones.
2020 The site changed servers and support infrastructure, requiring everything to be upgraded. It was now running on a faster server with a newer database and newer versions of Python and PHP.
The Future There's still much to do. If you want to find out more, or how to contribute, look at our website status page.
This page is maintained by members of BAMCA. See here for information on contacting us.
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