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June 07, 2004

10 Years on the 'Net

It's hard to believe. I've been on the Internet for 10 years this week. My first ISP ran on an Indy R4000 and a Pentium 60 (without the FPU bug) running Slackware Linux, with kernel 1.2! Those were amazingly powerful machines a long time ago. I remember naively sharing my account with a student at Texas Aggie (a mudder) so he could compile his homework faster. He taught me my first tidbits about the C programming language, and how to compile and figure out why Make failed (missing libraries, etc). I've come a long way...

My first Internet account was courtesy of my Mom. Actually, courtesy of my mom's High School, which decided to pay for all its teachers to have Internet accounts. Of course, my dear mom didn't know what an Internet was, and I was the computer geek, so she just handed the information packet to me. My first e-mail address? ewight@rsabbs.com (don't bother, it's been dead for years).

A year or two later, I ran a BBS using Public Address on our second phone line, during the times that I wasn't being an Internet junky. I never told my parents, but I actually set the computer to dial into the Internet at about midnight using the house line, and disconnect at 5am -- I let my BBS users send email and surf the web using lynx during those hours, as they could dial in on the other line. So I was acting as a micro-ISP. Except that my Mac kept crashing all the time (Public Address was written very poorly, and Mac OS 7/7.5 were even worse).

Ah, nostalgia.

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