fsckit.
Stories from a time when the internet was a wild frontier, modem pools were held together with prayer and zip ties, and hacking meant you actually understood the system — not just which button to click in some script someone else wrote.
From the Archive
EFNet and the IRC Days
1995. Age 13. EFNet, #minnesota, #2600, netsplits every ten minutes, getting kicked and killed for sport, and somehow befriending IRC Hall of Famer Dianora. Plus a friendship with merp that’s still going 30 years later.
Read →Hacking Meant Something Once
There was a time when calling yourself a hacker meant you had actually put in the work. Years of it. Not because some YouTube tutorial told you to, but because you genuinely needed to know how the thing worked.
Read →I Ran an ISP and Nobody Could Spell It
February 1, 2000. Age 18. Standing in front of a rack of modems trying to explain SLIP to a phone company tech watching his eyes glaze over in real time. Nobody had a roadmap. That was the job.
Read →$ whoami > early internet. regional ISP founder. BBS sysop. > infrastructure nerd before "cloud" was a word anyone used seriously. $ what is this site > not a Wikipedia article. not a corporate retrospective. > real stories. no filter. from someone who was actually there. $ why fsckit? > because in the Unix days, when a drive crashed and you had > to run fsck at 3am, that's exactly what you said. > if you know, you know.
What’s Here
The Blog
Unfiltered stories from the dial-up era. ISP wars, BBS culture, social engineering, infrastructure horror stories, and opinions on what happened to the internet.
All posts →The Timeline
From 2400 baud modems to carrier-grade infrastructure. A personal arc through the years the internet actually became the internet.
View →Gallery & Artifacts
Screenshots, BBS art, modem logs, and relics from the early days. The kind of stuff you couldn’t Google even if you tried.
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