From Baud Rates to Backbone
A personal arc through the years the internet became the internet — and what it felt like to be inside that transformation as it happened.
IBM PS/1. Age 11. The Phone Bills Begin.
Had an IBM PS/1 at home and figured out that a modem plus the right phone number meant access to other people’s computers. BBSs, mostly. Some through the PS/1, some through computers at UW Superior that I had no real business using as an 11-year-old. My parents got the phone bills. Hundreds of dollars. Plural. They didn’t kill me, which in hindsight was generous.
Going Deeper. EFNet. IRC.
Past just dialing into BBSs — started understanding how the systems worked underneath. And then found IRC. EFNet specifically. #minnesota, #wisconsin, #2600, #oper. Netsplits every ten minutes. Getting kicked, killed, and eventually K-lined for the education of it. Somewhere in there befriended Dianora (Diane Bruce) — EFNet IRCop, ircd contributor, actual IRC Hall of Famer — and a person who went by merp, who I still talk to today. IRC was the real internet before most people knew the internet existed.
Building Machines. Learning Everything Else.
The hobby years in full swing. Sourcing parts. Building computers for myself, for people I knew, for anyone who needed one. Learning networking hands-on. Getting obsessed with how data actually moved from one place to another. By 17, I could build a box from scratch faster than most people could configure a pre-built one. That knowledge base became the foundation for everything that came next.
Founded wen dot net (wen.net). Age 18.
Launched a regional ISP in Wisconsin called wen dot net (wen.net) on February 1, 2000. Six weeks before my 19th birthday. Modem banks, terminal servers, a T1 upstream, and the kind of confidence only someone who doesn’t fully grasp the downside risk can have. The dot-com boom was peaking. Broadband was starting to appear. Dial-up still had a real business left in it — but I knew the clock was ticking, and I built accordingly.
Running It. Learning the Hard Way.
The dot-com bubble burst. Customers still needed internet. The telcos were now actively trying to starve independent ISPs by controlling DSL rollout and dragging their feet on line provisioning. Debugging sendmail at 3am became routine. So did 30-hour stretches when something broke badly enough.
Infrastructure at Scale
The dial-up era was ending. Broadband was winning. Moved into carrier-grade infrastructure work. Fiber. BGP. Real backbone operations. The skills built running the ISP — designing for failure, understanding traffic at the protocol level, knowing what breaks and why — turned out to be exactly what larger operations needed.
Varayo. Still Building Pipes.
Founder & CEO of Varayo, focused on infrastructure and telecommunications, based in Los Angeles. Different scale. Different tools. Same fundamental understanding of how networks work at the level where things get real. The ISP days built the mindset. Everything since has been applying it.