In 1989 I started a BBS “bulletin board server” with SCO Unix and Mustang BBS Software
in my Condo in Long Beach, California. At the time there was the 213 / 310 area code split
and it used to cost a 1.00 to call from Venice Beach to Santa Monica, so a friend of mine
Crazy Dave “David Compel” talked me into getting a T1 line from his house to my condo in
Long Beach. The only place we ever advertised was in the Hollywood Xpress as an adult BBS
service at the time it was 29.95 a month with recurring charges on your credit card which
enabled us to put all the money into the BBS service. With in a year we were built out from
San Diego to San Francisco, by 1995 wee sold out to AOL.
In 1995 the internet was released to the public and I took the existing T1 I had running to
my condo and setup a radius server and had the first dial up internet service in the Long Beach
Ca. area I could not even give away the service I was charging 12.00 a month and I was listed as
the cheapest service with a T1 in southern California. But it paid for the T1 and I got unlimited
web access and proceeded to read the whole internet. That same year I went to work for a company
called Storage Concepts and one of the engineer’s I worked with told my if I setup a webserver and
email service that I could charge more for these services and improve my web access company on the
internet. Which turned out to be a lesson in pain, I spent a solid month trying to figure out to make
BSD Unix and Apache work after 5000 phone call’s and hours downloading patches I got it to work ! then
I refer to as round 2 in the pain lesson’s was setting up squirrel mail OMG after I got it to work, 3
days latter the Hard Drive filled up the server crashed and I proceeded to get death threats from all my
clients because Jesus had sent them an email with all of life’s answers in ? will I went and bought my
first Pentium computer and a good deal Dr. Steve Raid and got the email server back up and running.
This was the time I sat down to teach myself to program HTML version 1.1, so I sat down on a Friday
after work and downloaded the whole HTML publishing protocol and by Sunday I had a webpage I was lucky
in the since because of one of my prior jobs I got a version of Adobe Photoshop and had mastered working
with the software even though I had no real artistic skills I was still able to make a half way descent
webpage. By the time I got good with HTML version 1.1 the 2.0 standard came out and introduced java
scripting and after a short learning curve I started programming interactive web pages. Hence today
I have programmed in many different web languages but I prefer PHP and MySql or LAMP running on
Ubuntu Linux.