John Smailes and Gordon Holmer, who were close friends as 8M3 50th Entry Apprentices from 1945 to 1948, lost touch with each other after leaving Cranwell but were reunited in 1994 as a result of Gordon's persistent efforts to trace Entry members.

They, and John's brother-in-law Alan Robinson, began exchanging emails and in one, Gordon told John, who was living in Toronto, that he had located 8M3 member Ron Ross in Ottawa. Shortly after, they jointly emailed Ron saying "Ron, this is the first International message on the Internet, between a group of ex-apprentices - APPSNET is now in existence."

One small problem was that although Alan was in the RAF and stationed at Cranwell at the same time as the 8M3's, he was not an ex-Apprentice. We decided that as he was integral to the founding of Appsnet, we would make him an Honorary Apprentice and as such he was entitled to be a member. Sadly both Gordon and Alan are no longer with us.

To see an enlarged version of the following picture, just click on it

Other 8M3 (50th), 7M9 (49th) and 7M3 (48th) Entry members soon caught on and then the later Entries and some who finished their training at Locking also joined our ranks.

Barry Froggatt 7M9 (49th), Slim Simpson 8M3 (50th) and Jimmy Butt 7M3 (48th) quickly came aboard, closely followed by Don Worsfold 7M3 (48th). Slim introduced his friends Geoff Pritchett 9M9 (54th) and John Jarvis 2M6 (62nd); and then there were ten.

We went from ten to twenty, to twenty five members very quickly, and then grew more slowly up to 53 members (at the time of the last update).

Appsnet is about as democratic as it can get. There are no rules, no dues, no saluting, no jankers and no limits on what we talk about. Ex-Apprentices from all Entries are welcome and we have members in England, Scotland, Wales, Gibraltar, Spain, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Africa whose ranks on retiring cover the entire range from Apprentice to Air Commodore.

In addition to exchanging details of our daily life, our travels and our frustration with our computers, we do manage to organise a fair number of mini reunions. There are pretty well worn Apprentice's tracks within Ontario and between Ontario, Michigan, and Florida. Several UK and North American members have made it to Australia and New Zealand, and vice-versa; a few have shown up in Spain and Gibraltar, and of course UK members get to meet at the CAA AGM, besides arranging individual elbow bending jaunts.

The Internet makes exchanging images a very simple matter, and Appsnet members have taken full advantage of this facility to share photos of family, re-unions, current projects, birds and flowers in their gardens, country walks and landscapes, plus photos of their new or their classic cars, beside every other sort of photo imaginable.

We have a resident cartoonist, the one and only Jim Newman of 4M5 (68th) Entry fame, who keeps us all amused or insulted by his professional topical sketches.

Now and again we get to chewing over some part of Cranwell life, which we all enjoy, but we don't dwell on the past. Most discussion is about things relative to our daily lives and the differences we experience because we live in such a range of different places. Sometimes we get "inside information" on a world news item, because we have an Appsnet reporter live on location to tell us the real truth about what is happening.

Quite early on we realised that members wanted different things from Appsnet - some had computer or server concerns and did not want to receive large files, some wanted just a passive membership, some wanted to go into great detail about aviation matters, so we came up with our Star system. Members give themselves a classification of from one to five stars, which determines the types of messages and/or images that will be sent to them. This avoids loading mailboxes with unwanted messages or images and provides a way of stopping mail while a member is away.

Appsnet is one of the few things in life that is nothing but good.

What can there be bad about it?

Try it - you'll like it!