I got online in 1992. I was 11. Had an IBM PS/1 at home and figured out that the right phone number meant access to bulletin board systems — other people’s computers, communities of people I’d never meet, a whole world living inside a phone line. My parents found out about it the hard way, when the phone bills showed up. Hundreds of dollars. They didn’t kill me. I kept dialing.

I also had access to computers at UW Superior that I had no real business using the way I was using them at that age. That access, combined with an 11-year-old’s complete lack of restraint, is where the curiosity really took root.

I ran my own BBS for a stretch. Then I got involved in early internet access — the days when ISP stood for something you had to explain to people, when the question “what’s email?” was completely normal, when a T1 line felt like science fiction.

I founded and operated a regional ISP. I fought telcos over line provisioning. I debugged sendmail configurations at 3am. I watched the commercial web go from Mosaic to Netscape to IE to whatever it is now, and I was close enough to the infrastructure layer to see how the sausage was made the whole way.

That history is what built my thinking about infrastructure. About building things that don’t fail. About what “carrier-grade” actually means and why it matters. It’s the foundation underneath everything I’ve done since.

This site exists because those early days are getting mythologized in ways that miss the point. Someone who was actually there should probably say something about it.

$ whois est7bd
Handle:      est7bd
Origin:      0x7BD (hex) = 1981 (decimal)
Platforms:   X/Twitter · Instagram · TikTok
Day job:     Founder & CEO, Varayo
             Infrastructure & Telecommunications
             Los Angeles, CA

$ cat /etc/motd
No filter. No softening. Just what it was.