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Who am I?

Hi, I’m Graeme and these are my notes, from my messy desk. I started this blog because Google proved to be more useful at finding content than anything else I’ve used.

So I started adding my own content in the hopes that Google would index it and allow me to find things again in the future.

It works.

You can find out more about me here, and you should follow me on Twitter here.

Keeping up

You can automatically receive new content here by subscribing to the “Blog RSS” (link below). This is the easiest way to keep up with what I write here.  See this BBC article for a good introduction on RSS and keeping up with the goings on of the Internet more easily.

Hi, I’m Graeme Mathieson, and I’m your host. These are the notes from my messy desk.

History

I was thinking about this quite recently. Apparently I got my first “proper” TCP/IP connection to the Internet in 1996, through dialup to Demon Internet. That account has been in use ever since (my dad took it over in 2001 when I got my first DSL connection with another provider) until late 2009 when my dad got so fed up with the continual degradation of customer service (and the fact they lost his web site & entire email history when he moved home!). For a while before 1996, I’d been begging, borrowing and stealing Internet Access from friends (and a local College) who had Demon accounts.

But my first experiences of the Internet were through various gateways run by a BBS or two I used to frequent. Evaware had a Usenet -> FidoNet gateway so that’s where I started getting my Netnews fix. (I can’t remember, exactly, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion I arrived around the time of the September that never ended.) And then Almac, in Grangemouth, Scotland, announced that it was getting an Internet gateway, offering a month of free service to try it out. Their gateway was a Unix shell on a system directly connected to the Internet. We had such exciting things as Gopher, an FTP client, and a Usenet news reader!