About Walter Elly
I love technology but I love people- my family, the most. I’m a proud father of two, loving life in New Hampshire. What proceeds this paragraph can be summed up in 6 words: if it’s electronic, I’m into it. I’ve only just begun writing this page, starting at near the beginning and taking you up to when I discovered the web, so read on if you really want to get to know me better:
It all started when my father brought home his work-issued Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 laptop and showed me how he could type with his eyes closed. He typed the lyrics to James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James for me without looking. It was magic. I wanted to do that. From then on I took anything to do with computers dead serious. I was probably about 8 at this time. My school had a typing class the next year using Tandy 2000s. I was touch typing before I left elementary school.
Enter Ham Radio- I got my license when I was 11, learned morse code to get it and quickly gravitated towards PACKET radio. PACKET, for those who don’t know, was basically a precursor of the mobile web. I am not kidding you when I tell you that in 8th grade I did a show in tell with a ham radio portable HT in a backpack with a whip antenna sticking out, connected to a Tandy LT1400 laptop and a battery powered TNC, to show off how I could communicate digitally, portably. My moment of triumph in my mind was walking down the hallways while checking into PACKET bulletin boards on the laptop in between classes.
It was about the same time though that I discovered computer bulletin board systems or BBSes. These gems were the precursors of the public internet and social media as we know it. I ran a dial-up telephone computer bulletin board for about 4 years. I also experimented with running a PACKET based one, but the magic that I discovered within the realm of BBSes was far too compelling. There were secret societies and groups and political tracts to navigate. PACKET was black and white, BBSes had COLOR. PACKET was governed by the FCC. BBSes, well- think of the internet, what are the rules there? Yeah.
But it wasn’t long before I learned of what the next level was – I caught a glimpse of an X Window session while visiting a friend of my dad’s at a local college and the sheer volume of information traversing the screen from something called USENET was mindblowing. It was like BBSes except insanely, deeply intimately connected. With BBSes I had experimented with and participated in several FidoNet style BBS networks, but THIS was the king of all networks – The Internet. I was hooked. Still barely just in High School I had no way to access the Internet though at this time.
I learned more, talked to friends and soon found out that DELPHI was giving away free trials to their service which came with a UNIX shell account. I connected up, tried some of the tools and quickly discovered IRC. That was it for me – BBSes started fading as IRC replaced multi-node chat, USENET replaced forums, Gopher replaced etexts, MUDs replaced door games and FTP replaced file download sections on BBSes (and GOODBYE ZMODEM AND HSLINK!). #doom and #nin were my hangouts on IRC by the way if you were there back in the day- I went by the handle of firestrtr, a tribute to my BBS username.
Still to come: *firestrtr says “WTF is a PPP account and what is MOSAIC?” Followed quickly by my first job: getting a FOX O&O TV station online in 1995. THEN: What happened in college, what happened after college and why I’m here now.
And I haven’t even talked about VIDEO GAMES yet!
Stay tuned :)
