I am an electronic enthusiast from my earliest days of childhood. I was thrilled by batteries, wires, light bulbs and switches. The fascination of the magic of electrons hidden from the naked eye thrilled me in every experiment I did. Soon I discovered I could get vacuum tubes to light up when certain pins where touched by the wires from my battery. This caused my mother to buy me a vacuum tube experimenter kit when I was in grade school teaching be electronic component basics. A few years later in junior high school I was given a transistor experimenter kit. My electronic knowledge grew.

  In my senior high school years I took electric shop where I learned how to wire a house and built a few electronic project kits. A few years after I graduated high school I started to work for the local security alarm company installing residential burglar and fire alarms. This started my 35 plus year career in the alarm industry. I still kept my interest in electronics as chip technology started the new digital age of microprocessors and software programming.

  My first personal computer was a Commodore Vic-20. I chose the Vic-20 because when you purchased the reference manual you also got the design schematic showing you how the Vic-20 IC chips were configured. This helped me fully understand how the data and address buss worked and was controlled by I/O interrupts. Radio Shack sold universal plug in design circuit boards so I soon interfaced my own digital logic chips to my Vic-20 and then wrote the processor machine language code to make it work. I actually designed a football field score board using 7 segment LED readouts.

  I finally built my first 286 PC compatible computer running DOS 3.1 from parts I obtained from a software development company I installed a security and telephone system in. A few years later I finally obtained a phone modem and logged onto the Internet for the first time at a screaming 26.6k baud rate. I soon started teaching myself about designing websites. When you signed up for Brad’s Net Internet service you got 10mb of web space and an email address. So I started to design my web sites using Microsoft™ Publisher 98. I’d save my publication as a web site and upload the files to the Brad’s Net web space to be viewed. Brad’s Net soon offered web domain hosting and I registered my first personal web domain (eaksr.com) in 1999.

$nbsp; Brad’s Net didn’t offer any scripting options so I moved my domain registration to a hosting package I signed up for with 1and1.com (now Ionos.com) in 2004. I soon taught myself the basics of Perl programming and later PHP scripting. Although I have this hosting package with Ionos.com. I wanted my own server, so I subscribed to a VPS and started learning things through C-Panel. But since I wasn’t doing this to make money, the cost of this soon become a bit much with each increase of the company offering the VPS service. So now I’m teaching myself how to build and administrate a Linux server at my residence. I’m using this web site to track my progress as I create tutorials and help anyone else who wants to also learn how to do IT!