Call it an obsession, but I like computers.  So much, that I quit my job in March, 1996, just before the company closed.  I started working on computers that month, and never looked back.  I worked on an assembly line making treadmills till that day.   Now, I get paid for my hobby.  I totally enjoy my work, and besides having to pay for gas for my car and bills, would almost do it for free.  Do you enjoy your job?  I doubt it.  A brief history follows.

It all started one fatefull day when I was 10, and I caught a glimpse of something called a Commodore Computer.  I liked those little boxes that hooked to the Television set, and I figured one day they might become something.  A few years later, IBM came out with some contraption called a Personal Computer (PC).   I was about to go in the Army, and wasn't paying them much mind.  I still had my trusty Commodore 64 and all its accessories.  I get through training, and finally stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.   I went to the PX one day looking for a second disk drive for my computer, and the guy there showed me a Commodore Colt.  It was an IBM XT (8088) Clone made by Commodore.  Unlike the IBM model, it didn't cost $5000.00 and I liked it.  I had just gotten my Tax refund, so I grabbed one.  I figured I had a new toy, but I was slightly wrong this time.  I could do more with this thing than I had ever imagined.   Soon I had a modem, and a program to run a Bulletin Board System (BBS) running on it, and half the base started calling it.  I soon got a 286 Clone Running an operating system by Microsoft called Xenix (Unix).  I then discovered that our unit had a connector to the Arpa Net, and I figured out how to hook my computer in and have it run through the arpa net.  A few years later, they started calling the Arpa Net the Internet.

Finding things on this network was cryptic and slow.  Most searches were done via a program called Gopher.  It was a menu system, and seemed like you were on a large database.  In 1989 I came home and installed DOS on the 286 again, seeing as I had little use for Xenix outside the army.  I discovered we had BBS systems here in my hometown, and my parents phone bills were never the same.  In 1995 Tyler got a few Internet Providers, and a system called the World Wide Web was just being introduced full scale.  I finally had to convert to being a Windows user, as no Internet dialer was yet made for DOS.  In late 95, I found 2 solutions to my Windows hating dilemna.   One was FreeBSD and the other was Linux.  FreeBSD is a free version of the BSD Unix Operating System.  Linux is a Unix-like Free Operating System.