The Real Stories
No mythology. No nostalgia porn. Just what it was actually like to be on the internet before most people knew the internet existed.
EFNet and the IRC Days
1995. Age 13. EFNet, #minnesota, #2600, netsplits every ten minutes, getting kicked and killed for sport, and somehow making friends with actual IRC royalty. Dianora. Merp. Just darrell. Those channels were the real internet and nobody knew it yet.
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. Sitting in front of a terminal at 2am, not because some YouTube tutorial told you to, but because you genuinely needed to know how the thing worked. That’s gone now. And I miss it.
Read →I Ran an ISP and Nobody Could Spell It
February 1, 2000. Age 18. I launched wen dot net (wen.net) — a regional ISP in Wisconsin — standing in front of a rack of used modems with no roadmap, six weeks before my 19th birthday. Nobody had done this before. That was the job.
Read →The BBS Days: Before the Web Was a Thing
Before browsers. Before anyone used the word “online” as casually as they say “outside.” There were bulletin board systems, and if you knew the number, you were already ahead of 99% of the planet. And the community was real in a way that social media never has been.
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