The slower you go, the further you'll get.
By William Paul Fiefer (home)
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The slower you go, the further you'll get. By William Paul Fiefer (home) |
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Site History |
"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time
to change that here and there."
Richard Feynman |
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This site was born in 1993 and has been in continuous operation since. I built the first IP network to house it and registered a domain with InterNIC. That tangle of wire, people, and protocols consisted of two dual-homed servers (one a laptop), a router, a firewall, and seven desktop clients. My primary audience was 46 directly supported remote users, most who dialed in through my pool of ten, then the fastest you could buy, 14K modems.
The Internet and its Web protocol were fads then. Making business use of them was an extreme conception and I did not suffer from much online traffic. I liked that. I also did not have the luxury of canned software or books on how to accomplish something. Windows, IBM's OS/2, and Novell's Netware were Internet stupid, having latched to the idea that proprietary nets riding closed standards were the way to go. That way was way to expensive for me. I opted for an upstart called Linux, compiled my applications and servers for the Web, email, file transfer, and so forth from open source code that I often had to edit, and learned from Internet Engineering Task Force RFCs (Requests for Comment), a slew of helpful Usenet (the news) users, and an ever-growing body of Linux documentation. I built a second firewall purely of software and found it cheaper than and as secure as my hardware firewall. My pages are fully deboned and have never been gimmick-larded. I build each by hand using a flat-pitch text editor rather than a code generator. From their inception and originally of necessity, I design them to load quickly and be accessible from a wide variety of machines, most not running Windows, many being character terminals without mouse support. This fortuitously makes my site Section 508 compliant under the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act and accessible via such devices as text readers, handhelds, cell phones, pagers, marquees, tickers, and strategically-placed heart-shaped red tattoos. In 1995, I relocated my site to Prairienet, where it has remained. Prairienet is a great user-supported not-for-profit community network hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at my alma mater the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They have access to the best computer scientists on the planet Earth. They jack directly into the National Science Foundation research backbone. The hype hovers around zero. The commercial noise is low. Connection speeds are, well, phenomenal, as are the technical and general customer support. I like it like this. |
My dedicated line to the Internet backbone pumped at a then
phenomenal 56K. Internally I ran thinwire Ethernet and, save for
the router and firewall, everything was commodity Intel hardware.
My Windows users loaded the Trumpet Winsock, an excellent IP
stack from a programmer in Australia, because back then
Microsoft's Windows had no native Internet capability. I supplied
corporate clients with access to this network.