There was a certain advantage to working at a university during this time.  It was the early nineties.  The universities and all the collaborative research done my professors was one of the earliest applications to take advantage of the internet.  I was just amazed, that I could find so many other people in newsgroups that were interested in the same kinds of niche things that I was interested in.  I actually found an entire group of people on the news groups, that were big fans of Anne Macaffery and her Dragonriders of Pern series of books.  I had just gotten into reading again, and that was the series I had picked up.  Nobody I knew in real life had any interest in the books, but there was a rabid following online.  My first steps into an early form of social networking via the net had taken place.

Within a few years, I found myself online quite a bit, and even owned my own domain name.  I was as of yet not prepared to handle the web hosting on my own, so I enlisted the services of a gamer enthusiast, that had a server set up to host anyone with a games website for nothing.  The ultimate cheap web hosting deal of the time.  He actually registered the name and everything for me.  At one point, he moved on to other things, and generously transferred the domain name to me.  I still own that domain some ten years later.  For a while, I ran a web server out of my house, with an old PC I was no longer using.  It was a fun learning experience, where I learned lots about web hosting, mail servers and Linux administration in general.  These days, I pay to have my sites hosted, as it’s such a bargain anymore.  What with reseller hosting, seo hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers, there are far too many good choices to bother trying to run my own home server.  Besides, I have other fun techy things to discover these days.