When I was 14 or so, our family got our first computer in 1993.  Everything changed for me.  I found a new form of entertainment!  I went from a Nintendo junkie to a computer junkie!

Okay, I admit it; I still played my video games, but I spent more time on the computer going forward.  I was so hooked!  I even learned how to upgrade the computer myself – hard drive, memory, floppy drives, etc. As quickly as technology evolved, I was upgrading.  Back then, computers were advancing VERY quickly – so most of my money was well spent there.

I first got online in 1995.  I believe it was CompuServe, and then AOL, paying for a second phone line since my mother didn’t like me being on the phone all the time, and also $.10/minute because the dialup server was long distance!  Soon, local Internet access was available.  But it was still a few towns away from us, so I still was paying long distance.  I was paying over $100 a month for dialup.  Good thing I had a job!

Back then you got a certain number of minutes for a monthly fee, and then it was like $.25/minute after that.  It was kind of like cell phones today.  I remember I had a cell phone back then, too (ugly big bag phone for the car only).  But I only used that for emergencies.

I was an addict – learning all I could about computers online; I also discovered Internet Relay Chat.  I met up with people all around the world in chat rooms on computers and programming.  This is how I learned it all so quickly!

I built my first Web site within my first year online, and also hosted my own virtual server back in 1997.  It had all the bells and whistles, UNIX, Apache, and some form of SQL if I remember correctly.

I even had a shell account and had the ability to add user accounts and run my own scripts and applications.  I also compiled my own IRC server linked to another network (I think it was called Gamma Network).

I also gave away free hosting to some of my friends online.  This was when being on the Web was EXPENSIVE and difficult!  And if you knew how to get online and have a Web presence, you were super cool!

Back then, getting traffic was SUPER easy!  Any beginner could get hundreds or thousands of hits a day with a little bit of work using some dirty little tricks (like keyword stuffing, etc.).

I never did figure out how to take credit cards online – back then, you had to be a rocket scientist to do so.  I just never bothered because it was so difficult, and I had other interesting things to do.  Eventually I found another way to monetize that traffic.  It’s called: Affiliate Marketing

Stay tuned for my next post about how I generated my first income online!