On 31 August, CCIL will be shutting down its main servers, so I have been forced to move from my previous home to another; GitHub offers page hosting—a win for blogging—and deployment is a snap: git push handles most of the heavy lifting after crotal generate.

Having said that, it's a shame that CCIL is shutting its doors; while the email will live on, it was a unique community for a long time. ESR and Jordan Seidel started the freenet in 1993, and I joined in early '94 as a middle school student. CCIL offered a unique BBS-style interface for ease of use, assuming (rightly) that most people weren't prepared for running around on a UNIX command-line interface.

I learned how to drop into an unrestricted shell using vi (:!/bin/sh seemed to do the right thing), which was a Big No-No at the time. I'm not sure who caught me, but in the end it turned out very well. They offered me a deal: I could work the help desk or leave the system. I met ESR briefly at a board meeting, saw some of the servers, and formed relationships with Chuck Peters and Kathy Miles, who dragged me along when Prentice Hall asked for a book on using Linux. (Chuck's brother, Kevin, got me a job at DecisionOne, which is how I learned to do tech support. The number one rule of technical support is that no one wants to talk to you.)

While I don't know that my contributions to the book were very good—I suspect time doesn't do many favors to my writing in general—it was a pretty heady experience for a young college student and taught me a lot.

Memories of my youth are largely characterized by being confused, but I remember fondly trolling about on MUDs, playing with Archie, chatting using UNIX talk, and connecting on an interminably slow 1200 bps modem from below my bunk bed on my dad's antiquated DEC Rainbow. (I still have a 2400bps modem I keep around, along with an 8th-grade paper talking about some bright future where everyone might have a modem in their home!) I argued theology with people on USENET (and Fidonet before that), rolled my own web pages (still my preference, although I like to play with Python now instead of just writing HTML), and spent hours coding through the night trying to be just leet enough.

It really was an interesting time for the Internet, and CCIL was a tremendous resource for those of us who were just getting introduced to it. I'll treasure those memories. The old address will live on, I suppose, but I'll miss the Interlink cityscape.