Starting in high school English I and onward we had to spend like 10 minutes every class period writing in a journal that we had to hand in at the end of the nine week period for grading. Presumably this was to get us to write more and use our words, and we’d be graded on the number of pages. I absolutely hated this exercise because who does this teacher think she is, reading our private thoughts? It got more than one classmate in trouble when the subject of said writing was about teachers.
A while back I found these journals buried in a box in Oklahoma and dug them out to go through them again. I apparently hated this work so much I wrote about it daily, my hate of school, how bored I was, and other teenage angsty things.
However it did capture the time period when I started using bulletin boards, Linux, and the beginnings of my ISP (which I started in between my junior and senior years of high school). I was also raising sheep in a pasture in our backyard, so there were lots of entries about taking care of them, building fence, and other sheepy-things.
The earliest entry was the fall 1993 semester so I had just started using a modem that summer. Oddly enough I barely mentioned my PC work or upgrades which I was deeply into at the time, if I had then that may have helped bump up the page count.
Jan 12 1994: Got a copy of the Wildcat! BBS 2.6 Test Drive and installed it for the first time
Mar 17 1994: Got my own phone line, a root canal, and about to turn 15
Dec 5 1994: $70 phone bill! Notes show that long distance calling after 6 PM was costing me 17 cents a minute.
Dec 20 1994: $30 CRIS/Concentric Research Net/BBS Direct bill, which provided 1-800 access to larger bulletin boards and SLIP/PPP Internet access
Jan 11 1995: Got a MSI hat, a shareware collection CD, and a card from Rick Heming at Mustang Software thanking me for answering a bunch of tech support questions about Wildcat! on the message boards over the holidays on the Mustang Software BBS
Jan 24 1995: Installed Slackware Linux for the first time on my 386SX
Jan 31 1995: Got Wildcat! BBS Multiline 10 up and working
Feb 6 1995: Went to a OneNet “convention” in Red Rock, OK to hear about the development of a statewide Internet for schools, first time I encountered a Sun SPARCstation. (Red Rock was a very wealthy school district that had state of the art everything including a 56k or T1 line)
Feb 9 1995: First time installing X-windows on my Linux box
Feb 14 1995: ran up 967 minutes of long distance calls, $80 CRIS bill
Feb 15 1995: Got my hands on some old VT-100 terminals from a surplus donation at school, realized how dumb terminals worked
Mar 3 1995: First time I’ve written HTML and uploaded a public web page to the CRIS web server
Aug 25 1995: Installed Windows 95 for the first time
Sep 1 1995: CRIS bill was $156
Dec 6 1995: Learned to configure named to set up a caching nameserver
Jan 3 1996: Compiled SOCKS 4.22 proxy server and kernel for first time (I forget what I was doing with this, maybe I had put my Linux box on my PPP connection and proxied my Windows 95 apps through it)
Sometime around this time period I had sold a 10Base2 network and some new computers to the school. They had a free PPP connection and I had rigged up things to share it along with DOS files on the LAN
Jan 8 1996: Got an IPX/ODI packet driver stack working on MS-DOS so TCP/IP and LANsmart could co-exist
Jan 23 1996: Get an account with a new ISP in the area, discover the wide area calling plan our telco offered did not cover it. This disappointed me so much and planted the ISP seed
Jan 29 1996: At school, built an ARCnet to Ethernet router with KA9Q NOS so older computers on old LAN can use Internet
Feb 29 1996: Declare my plans to start an ISP
March 5 1996: Went to a school board meeting to try to get them to get a leased line connection, tried to give an Internet demo
Apr 1 1996: Talking to Galaxy Star Systems (an ISP in Tulsa) about quotes on a 384k frame relay circuit
Apr 1996: Passed my Netware 3 Certified Novell Associate (CNA) cert; started searching for office space for the ISP, getting equipment quotes
I started my ISP in the summer of 1996, I want to say the 56k frame relay connection went up on June 18, 1996.
The 1996-1997 journal covers the growing pains and trying to break even before running out of runway.
Jan 6, 1997: Got an extra loan to build own office building to escape high rent
Jan 8, 1997: Got first Cisco 2501 router, learned how to configure it to be primary ISP router. I needed this because I was bringing in a second frame relay T1 to open my first POPs in other towns.
Jan 29, 1997: Southwestern Bell techs say T1s have been turned up at new building, moved all of our gear over, only to find out the other end of the T1 hasn’t been connected to the frame relay switch. Moved everything back that night, a several hour outage.
Feb 4 1997: Hit 160 monthly dialup customers, almost breaking even!
Mar 20, 1997: Turned 18, wrote hot checks to cover Southwestern Bell bills!
Mar 31, 1997: Finally turned a monthly profit of $100 for the first time. Went directly to Southwestern Bell to read their tariffs to see how to set up call forwarding to expand access, options on T1 contracts. Setting up largest PoP (2 or 3rd?). This is the start of me being a real thorn in the side of telcos.
Not a whole lot of journal entries after this. We were on a new very-not-good English teacher and guess she was pretty lax.
To this day I still have dreams where I’m an adult and am still in English class, like it never ended. Then I wake up and thank god I really passed and finished years ago.
