Joe Pruett

Summary

"He built the Internet" Well, that is how my wife talks about me but no, I am not Al Gore. But I was around during the days you had to sign a document stating you wouldn't use the ARPA/NSFnet for commercial purposes. Funny how times change. When I was helping to build Teleport, the term ISP wasn't being used yet, the web didn't exist yet, we were making things up as we went along. Modems evolved from 9600 baud to 56k. A single 256k frame relay circuit could support hundreds of users. A gigabyte of disk was a sight to behold. Going from Ethernet hubs to switches was way cool. We were subjected to SYN flood attacks just by the nature of the Internet (sometimes the connection to Europe was a one way street). We hacked SunOS (not Solaris) kernels to allow for virtual web hosting. Linux was 0.99 for many moons and only ran on those toy computers. We had tables groaning under the weight of stacks of Sun hardware. We had rows and rows of racks full of modems, and they all had beautiful blinking lights. We built a window and put in a couch so we could sit and be mesmerized by the glow. Now people moan if their laptop doesn't have 200 gigabytes of disk space, 4 gigabytes of RAM, 256 megabytes of display memory, a gigabit Ethernet port, or weighs more than 5 pounds. OK, so enough reminiscing. Basically I've been around the Internet for quite some time. I've learned a few things, but not enough to stay away from it. After having left Teleport, I got sucked back into another ISP (Spiretech). I'm still there. I still get great pleasure from getting people hooked up into this chaotic mess even if they just spend their time buying other peoples' junk, looking at naughty pictures, or leaving rabid comments on blogs. I mean that isn't all that different from USENET, is it?