About
Home At Last Farms was originally established in 1956 near Warrensburg, Missouri. Shortly after my family and I were moved to San Angelo in 1996, it became apparent that I was going to retire from my career as a professional pilot with the U.S. Government. We bought a small farm near Wingate. I though the name was appropriate because I had spent my life traveling and would finally have a place to settle down and travel no more.
The “network division” idea came about when I tried to find a local web hosting service. I wanted to establish a web presence for a small business I had started after retirement. There wasn’t any such critter within a hundred miles of here. There were a number of firms that offered such services, but in my opinion, they were overpriced. Their servers were several hops from the backbone. Some of them didn’t even have redundant drives. I met one fellow near San Angelo who had his server set up in his garage! His sole computer was a single Pentium II that was over clocked to 400 mhz with two 40 gig drives. No uninterruptible power supply, no fire extinguisher, no tape backup. I still get chills thinking about my files and data residing on that server!
I’ve always been interested in computers. I purchased a Commodore VIC 20 in 1983. Later,when I was employed by the U.S. Government in 1986, I designed, installed, and managed the first local area network in the US Customs Service. It’s topology was arcnet.
Around 1992, I lost contact with the computer world. I had looked at Windows 3.1 and OS2. It seemed clear to me that the market place would select OS2, since it was a clearly superior OS. I literally “slept” through the “Windows Revolution”. Returned to the mainland after a 6 year assignment in Puerto Rico. I looked at PC’s again and the only thing I could see was “Windows”.
I was very familiar with networking in general, but html was a bit like Greek to me. CSS was similar to Russian while PHP looked like Latin. I missed the “Browser Wars” and the “Net Boom and Bust”. I’m now learning a lot about web page design, but frankly, I’m still more comfortable with what happens behind the html code to display a page.