| Imperial was a range-topping luxury automobile model, and later stand-alone luxury marque manufactured by the Chrysler Corporation from 1926-1993.
The symbol for Chrysler starting in 1963 was the Pentastar, which contained shapes representing the five marques produced by Chrysler: Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto, Chrysler, and Imperial. Chrysler marketed Imperial as a stand-alone marque (just as Cadillac is its own marque, and not a GM or Chevrolet vehicle) from 1955-1975, and Imperial was top-of-the Chrysler line 1924-1954 and again in 1981-1983 and 1990-1993. Imperial competed directly with full size, Lincoln (Ford) and Cadillac (General Motors) luxury cars during this time.
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| MAILING LIST & REGISTRY |
| Join hundreds of other owners for technical and trivia conversations on our email mailing list that has been running since 1996 !! When you sign up, we encourage you to click the "Digest" option to get one summary email each day, rather than each individual message as they are sent by members. |
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| We have over 100,000 pages of information, and we are LINKED-TO from over 175,000+ other web pages. The site is run by volunteers for free, and WE NEED PEOPLE WITH HTML and WEB/SOCIAL MEDIA skills. Is that you? Please join us to update our website, started in 1996 ! It is our goal to be there for people when they need us. Here are the types of Volunteers we are looking for : |
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1. Graphic Design of HTML pages and GUI's - some of our main navigational and landing pages need help, and we'd like to develop and execute some updated standards for our site. If you can put together a GUI or design a standard that will help shape an entire category of content and help make our system easier to use while making it prettier to the eye, we want to hear from you ! 2. Content processing - we get submissions from people all the time, and we'd like to add videos and scanned images as well as members' cars to the site. Can you create an HTML page and stick to established formats ? We've been going since 1996 and take pride that our website is very consistent throughout despite having about 30 different people involved over the years. 3. Social Media specialist - The website crew here all answer to Ebenezer or Elmer Fudd. We'd like to make our website visible to others who would benefit from an introduction. If you've got ideas, we'd like to hear from you. We've made it this far with a light presence on Social Media, how could we do better ?
IMPERIAL REFERENCE MATERIAL WANTED
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| WHO WE ARE
The Online Imperial Club (OIC) is a free, 100,000+ page, non-profit, archival reference website and mailing list run by people passionate about our favorite automobiles. We are passionate about collecting, publishing, and sharing everything that we can find about this lesser known vehicle to help others in their passion and curiosity.
The OIC website is also the gateway to the Imperial Mailing List (IML), which is the first, and oldest car club to exist exclusively online, having been initially started as a digitizing project in 1982(!) by Tony Lindsey.
It was launched online as a mailing list/club in 1995 and as an archival website in 1996 - see below for the full story behind that.
The two entities are intertwined, but are distinct from each other. They were formed at the very beginning of public use of the modern internet, and were part of the idealistic vision that the internet could provide services for free for the betterment of mankind - as epitomized by sites like www.craigslist.org and in direct contrast to profit-based sites such as www.eBay.com, both early players in online culture. We are in the first group - everything that we do is free to the public (hopefully for as long as there is someone alive to keep the lights on!).
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| HISTORY |
Tony Lindsey, Founder of the OIC and IML
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| This quote comes from the earliest cached record of the club website, and reveals founder Tony Lindsey's Imperial origins in his own words, published in 1996 :
I have been storing computer-based information about Chrysler Products since 1982, when I began using Wordstar 1.0 on a Compaq Portable to edit my car-club's newsletter. Since then, I diligently stored every possible scrap of useful information on diskettes, then Syquest cartridges, then magneto-opticals, then on CD-ROM. Why? Because I couldn't see the sense of letting wisdom evaporate into nowhere. Every time I'd go to a car-club meeting, the old-timers would wait until somebody would ask a specific question, answer it, and then sit back and be quiet. Being a beginner in the car-hobby, I wished I could just download all of their wisdom directly into my head. When I became president of the club, I started storing everything that I could type on my own, then I started asking club-members to type some ads from car magazines that would help in my project. After gathering about 3,000 listings of resources for upholstery, engine-parts, and so on, I printed little booklets with the information neatly organized. I had the idea that I could sell them and update them. Unfortunately, nobody that I approached thought the booklets were worth buying for more than a dollar, which was my break-even cost. I didn't get discouraged, I just gave up on trying to sell the information. I started giving it away on diskettes. That got tiresome, so I just kept on keeping on with my gathering project. Years later, I started an online car-club for Imperial owners, and I stored every single message that was sent through my computer. I started to create some web-pages to display them back in August of 1996, but I quickly became bogged down. It was an appalling amount of hand-work to create these pages, and I couldn't keep track of everything in my head. After a few pages, I burned out. In early 1997, I started learning a program for the Macintosh called "Userland Frontier". It's a very intimidating program at first, and I found it to have a sharp learning curve, but now that I've mastered it, I can crank-out neatly organized web-pages every day without confusion. Judging from the material I have at hand at this moment, I expect there to be a minimum of 500 Imperial-related web-pages posted. I'm adding a few more every day, so please stop by periodically and see what's new. I freely post this information because of my longtime philosophy: "Information Shared is Wisdom Multiplied." If I help you, I'm really helping myself as well. I needed a way to keep all of this stuff organized, and now that I have, I like to share it with others, who may help me in return. It all goes around and around, if it's done right. I hope you enjoy visiting these pages !
As Tony migrated his stored digital information onto the internet, it was naturally suited to being "found" by early search engines on an internet with very little content posted in the mid-to-late 1990's as the internet was just beginning to turn into what it is today. Online activity then saw people finding this growing cache of digitized and organized information that fed the group's early and rapid growth into the online club that it eventually became.
It soon splintered into two groups: The Imperial Mailing List - The Webmonsters Simply by way of being early and first to place such topic-specific information on the world wide web, the OIC was present and available, as public access to the internet ramped up in the mid-to-late 1990's.
This website and mailing list gave a meaningful landing spot for others who typed "Chrysler Imperial" into their web browsers. People who had otherwise been disconnected from each other found a community that they could participate in, and these people were more often than not (in the first few years), similarly tech savvy and prone to having internet skills of their own, as these were the people most likely to be internet users in 1995-1997+.
The OIC was the first returned result for searches related to "Chrysler Imperial" for well over a decade, with early search engines referring people searching for all manner of other automotive topics referring people to the site first because search alogorithms had not advanced far enough to differentiate a web page about Chrysler transmissions not being of interest to a person searching for Ford transmissions. With so much aggregate content in comparison to other web pages, early search engines prioritized the OIC in their search results far in excess of the actual relevance of the materials specific value to the user.
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DONORS Our expenses are covered by donations by club members and the public, so if you get value from visiting us, we'd appreciate it if you'd return the favor. You can see the other club members who donated on our Donors Page: |
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