tomdifran's Page

In Internet years, I'm really old (66 in 2025). My Internet journey officially began in the mid-1990's and it lead me on many fine adventures and some very harrowing ones, as well. My wife and I retired one year ago having owned a quaint used bookstore in a small town in south Texas. Prior to that I worked in I.T. for over a decade and then became a newspaper and magazine columnist covering the Internet for another decade or so. This website very much reminds me of what the Internet was like when I first started accessing it. 

04/18/2025
I actually started preparing for my Internet adventure that began in 1994, way back in the very early 1980's by becoming Interested in home computers. My inability to financially afford a TI-99 computer made by Texas Instruments or a Commodore Vic-20 far out-weighed my ability to own one. At the time, I was a young married Coastie, that is, a member of the U.S. Coast Guard and earned very little and my wife at the time, decided that she was allergic to employment so we were quite poor. I worked too many hours and too many strange shifts in communications to be able to hold down a part-time job. So while my fellow (single) shipmates were spending their money on home PC's, I was relegated to just observing them using those devices in their bachelor pads or sometimes, even at work, as they would bring them in on a quiet and calm night-shift sometimes. I'll have to admit it, I so envied those guys. I lusted over their personal computers and not their many girlfriends, thus that is when I started to become a geek.

* As far as Coast Guard communications goes, I'm so old that I started out as a certified high-speed Morse code operator (22 WPM) and the closet thing to a computer at our communications center was an old Navy issue analog/mechanical Radio Teletype machine that we used to communicate with other Coast Guard units and some research vessels such as the Calypso, which at the time was quite famous. If you'll visit Wikipedia and search on "RV Calypso" you'll find some fascinating reading.

** If you'd be interested in reading more of my Internet adventure story, please drop me a line at tomdifran@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you.

04/19/2025 12:23 AM Central Time, USA
I was pleasantly pleased to hear from Chris who created this website, that was a nice surprise. I told him that I'd continue telling my stories but alas, not tonight. I spent way too much time outside in the hot south Texas heat and blustery winds today and my brain is slightly fried and frazzled.

Back to MicroSocial