Welcome to Pal Negyesi's auto history website

Created: 13 February, 1996
Updated: 3 November, 2009

The maintaineer's introduction

My name is Pal Negyesi, 36, living in Balatonalmadi, Hungary near Lake Balaton.
I graduated as a librarian in 1997 and as a communication expert two years later.
I am now the managing director of ceauto.co.hu, an automotive industry research and analyst company.
This page is mostly about the background story of the KTUD Archive, but here are a few of my other achievements:

• After six years of research I've written a book on the history of Méray, the first Hungarian motorcycle company in 1998.
• In 2000 I contributed to the Beaulieu Encyclopedia of Automobiles which received a Cugnot Award from the Society of Automotive Historians
• A year later I contributed to another book on the history of Ford and Hungarians at the Ford factory.
• Meanwhile I supplied some photos to a book on East European cars by Julian Nowill.
• Between 1997-2000 I edited AutoClassic, a Hungarian classic car magazine
• Since 2001 I have published numerous articles in Veteran Auto és Motor
• In 2006 a 400-page automobile encyclopedia with 800 illustrations, titled as the AutoEnciklopedia was published by www.nagykonyvkiado.hu
• In 2009 I have edited a nice book on the history of Hungarian cars.

A bit of rambling on the background of the site

Hungary is a small country in Eastern Europe with a rich cultural tradition. The Hungarian language, although it's hard to learn and only a fraction of people speak it around the globe is full of emotional words which reflectour habits. We're emotional types.
The last few years we, Hungarians tried to switch from communism to capitalism. We have a hard period, but it should not be compared to the situation of other countries around here, because they had a far worse economical state.
I've been interested in the "dark side" of automotive history for years, like coachbuilders, cars from exotic countries, specialty cars etc. So I am not too good in painting, sculpting or any other form of artistic self-expression. So I thought Internet would be a great tool to introduce my enthusiasm and look for fellow fans.

When I first got access to Internet there were no WWW, no MySpace, no Youtube, no Google :) I looked around and then I decided to set up an anonymous ftp site where text and pictures were available on specialty cars. It resided at the University Faculty's website. KTUD is an abbrevation for Konyvtártudomány which means Librarian Studies. The name of this WWW/ftp archive is a tribute to the faculty where I was studying at that time and where the archive was first located.
In 1995 the FTP site evolved into a website, the KTUD Archive which resided at the Team.Net server. That's where it remained for the next 12 years.
People, like Dave Sisson, Pat Braden (RIP), Barnstetter, Bolko Rawicz, Dariusz Piecinski and many many others helped with photos, information, stories or just reassuring comments.
In 1996 I visited the editorial offices of Automobile Quarterly, Road&Track, checked out the Petersen Automotive Museum, visited the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance for the first time - and this trip gave me a huge boost.
There were many interesting stories, like a British businessman who became my friend. He first started browsing the Net and when he stumbled into the KTUD Archive many, many times he wanted to find out who's behind it and visited me. And when Global Auto Systems Europe, a predecessor of ceauto company was set up, our American partners admitted that they were a fan of KTUD Archive for many years. Even today, some of our clients recognize my name due to the KTUD Archive :)

One more thing which for many years meant a lot, but these day may not mean that much: here I'm not featuring non-original photos. I was forced to lighten a bit, so sometimes there are pictures from factory press releases and pre-2nd World War magazines.

© and Copy, 1995-2009: Pal Negyesi, Balatonalmadi, Hungary