The basic rules of the contest were formulated that fall; the current contest rules are very similar to the original set --- most of the changes over the years have involved elaborations or refinements of the original rules. Following the Thanksgiving 1977 holiday weekend the entrants were solicited within the station. The contest entrants hand delivered their entries to the members of the contest audit committee prior to New Year's Eve and the game began. For the first year no published list of Entrants and Selectors was distributed; an occasional memo was passed along to entrants but none of those documents have survived to be used to add substance to this website.

The fall of 1978 saw a few minor changes to the rules for the 1979 Contest; they were published and distributed to potential entrants both inside and outside of the radio station. The 1979 Contest featured the first published list of Entrants & potential Grim Reaper Victims and their Selectors. This contest also was the first to feature a published End-of-Contest listing of contest results distributed at the end of January 1980.

By the start of the 1980 Contest all but one of the regular features of this website had been implemented as a normal part of the annual contest: a published list of potential Grim Reaper victims and their selectors; a printed quarterly update of contest standings and a printed End-of-Contest results sheet. It was during the 1980 Contest that successful kills were coded onto 80-column IBM punch cards. Although not initially distributed to entrants this deck of cards ultimately became the Book of the Dead database.

The contest continued through 1985, adding new entrants each year from greater and greater distances from East Lansing. The quality of the publications improved each year and the quality of the entry lists also improved greatly. However, by 1984 it was obvious that the initial wave of interest in the game was waning and the 1985 Contest saw the smallest entrant turnout since 1979.

For two years (1986 & 1987) the contest went on hiatus. In early fall of 1987 a number of previous entrants sent letters to the old contest entry P.O. Box asking if there would be a contest in 1988. It was decided to give it one more try so 1988 Contest Entry Information sheets were printed and mailed to contestants from the early 1980s. The 1988 Contest was the last to permit hand-delivery of entries to members of the Audit Committee (until the 2006 contest). The Thanksgiving weekend 1988 Update of Standings and 1989 Contest entry information also included a special attachment that was sent only to current entrants - a printed copy of the Book of the Dead (it was a "plain vanilla" copy of the database card images, printed on 11' X 14" data processing paper).

The 1989 Contest saw a new innovation - the Caskets on Line computer bulletin board. Entrants with a computer and modem could dial in to a dedicate line/computer and submit their entries electronically. the Update of Standings, list of Kills and other information was being updated and made available on a monthly basis. For the first time an up-to-date version of the Book of the Dead was available for download. It even offered a primitive Chat function (callers could "Chat" with the operator if he happened to be in the room when they called).

The 1990 Contest listing of Grim Reaper Victims also included a printout of the Book of the Dead; this continued for a couple of years until the Book of the Dead was again separated from the entry information and distributed over the Thanksgiving weekend, now as a 100+ page spiral bound booklet.

Again, interest in the contest grew each year, with more and more entries from a progressively wider geographic circle - we finally went border to border: east to west coast, and Texas to Michigan.

This time, suspension of the annual Contest came about due to overwork by the organizers. The 1996 Contest was the last for three years. During the second hiatus a number of things changed: the hard drive on the old clunker that hosted the dialup bulletin board failed — Caskets on Line was gone for good. However, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the installation of a university server, plans were made to put the existing contest information on the internet. By 1999 the basic setup of the contest website had been finalized (after several ugly intermediate versions had been tried and replaced). We were ready to resume the contest for 2000.

The Book of the Dead (a single 800Kb file) was online and partial elements of the 1978, 1979 & 1980 contests had been coded. The 2000 Contest Rules were placed on the web (E-mail entry submission only). We were off and running again.

Before the end of 2000 we had broken the database into separate alphabetic files and also added the Targets of Opportunity database (people who were still alive); a 2,500 name database in 1998 was now up to almost 7,500 names by the start of 2000. Images were being added to the database, then sound files, and then movie clips. We've also added a number of auxiliary files (like this one). A website that consumed barely 3Mb at the end of 1999 now sprawls over 70 Mb of disc space (we expected it to reach 20,000 names & 100Mb by the end of 2003 — it actually took until April 2006 to make the 20,000 name plateau; the whole website was over 150Mb in 2006, but we only had room to post half of it).

Initially the main catalog of the website was generated by a local Alta Vista search engine - the resulting database could be searched locally but was not seen nationally or world-wide (the local bot kept its search results to itself). When the university added a local Google search bot in 2000 the entire website became visible to the rest of the internet (especially the Book of the Dead databases); the local Google bot sends what it finds back to the mothership AND it searches much deeper into the secondary, tertiary, quaternary, ... files found in the site. Every stupid word or phrase in the website can now be found by anyone, anywhere, anytime. What started out as a limited distribution paper publication, read by fewer than 100 people in a year, is now seen by thousands of internet users weekly (we are estimating at least 500,000 page visits for 2002, with perhaps double that for 2003). This is a mixed blessing: on one hand the contest gets a lot of exposure world wide; the downside to all of that exposure is a whole lot of E-mail. So far it has not translated to an explosion of entries, but perhaps that is the next shoe to drop.

In 2002 we finally decided that the website's URL was just too darn complex to convey in an easy manner (people kept having trouble with that funny tilda character "~") ... we broke down & spent some money on our own domain — casketsonparade.org. And, in mid-2003 we squandered more cash to pick up a separate domain for the database — bookofthedead.info. These domains are actually a "redirect" to the old (ugly) URLs ... however they did permit us to start using a more appropriate domain structure for incoming E-mail.

The immediate plans for the website include coding of more previous contest data and the continued breakup of the hugest alphabetic files (some of them have broken the 800Kb barrier again). We think that we will be all caught up with data entry & coding by 2025 to 2030.

In 2004 we started to receive some casual word-of-mouth publicity; but in 2006 we got an actual mention in a published book (unfortunately, they called us a dot-com, not dot-org). We must be doing something right — one of those places that registers unused domains claimed casketsonparade.com and put up a nothingburger site (guys, don't hold your breath. We ain't springing big bucks to buy you out. Do something original with it). And, we've even found some genre of band that named itself "Caskets on Parade." So much for having a unique name presence on the internet!

In 2007 our original ISP - Michigan State University - said "bye bye" to alumni accounts. Whoa dude - we had 30 days to find a new home. So, we up and packed our "bags" for the new ISP - Godaddy.com (you know, the guys that have those lurid Superbowl ads). And, in 2008, we started picking up variants on our base domain name ... if they ever give our planet's natural satellite a top-level domain, we'll get registered as casketsonparade.moon!

As for future contests — we expect to be around for several more decades. Keep those queries and entries coming! Our 28th Contest (in 33 years) has concluded; in 2011 we are taking a sabbatical leave to rest our keyboard end do some much-needed site maintenance (hoping to return for contest #29 in 2012).

page last updated 03/26/2011