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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.



I am Anthony "Antwon" Youhas! The Antwon behind antwon.com! The defender of the Cliché Kitty! The man of a thousand Broodings! I put the 'Twon in TwonSoft! But as for my humble online origins:

I first started Internetting from a Netcom account with a 28.8kbps modem in 1995 or so, my junior year of high school. No, I'm not one of those cool people who first started emailing by sending punched cards via USPS or whatever. Sorry.

My friends and I were all on Netcom; at some point, we managed to "commandeer" baga.baga, a hideously unused newsgroup apparently carried by Netcom and Netcom alone. This was a tremendous boon to us: instead of sharing little snippets and blurbs and conversations back and forth via email, we got to have an honest-to-gosh communal free-for-all. It was great, the way we could find time to have deep and meaningful conversations, even if we were separated by distance and scheduling quirks and whatnot. And that's when it really hit me that there might be something substantive about that whole 'Internet' thing....