i owe my story almost exclusively to @calmudgeonCal Deobald ... in 1987, i spoke to "santa" (him and my mom) through the school computers on a lan using `talk` when i was 6.

then shareware games tossed between dad and my uncle, using pre-internet tools that were magic to me. 286 days.

then came the internet of the early 90s, which was slow and awful and i didn't quite get it. as a 10-year-old, i never understood why the win3.1 archie and veronica icons didn't open digital comic books. i wrote some c and basic on the 386 but the network didn't grab me yet.

then dad took a notion to start a "community network" — a local isp for our village, supported by the canadian government. my first exposure to free software was apache on windows nt 3.51 running in the school library, where all the modems were. when we got our first pentium 120, i started making websites.

the early web was raw and clumsy and magical and i miss it dearly.