HOW IOLFREE GOT ON GOPHER
Firstly the name, I borrowed it from a
dialup ISP, where back in the day you could
get ten mb of hosting free. 
You could sign up multiple times.

You could telnet into iol and
through menus you could use pine, lynx
usenet, irc and do ftp transfers. I used
NCSA Telnet. This was my introduction to the
dumb-terminal monospaced type of computing.

At the time there was no command line
or terminal on Macintosh. But
I enjoyed this older unix type of interface.
When I got os-x I was plunged into a terminal, 
Darwin OS. I learnt to
navigate in the filesystem using the commands.

I could find commands by researching in a web 
browser. Also I wanted to read a few newsgroups,
for example;
uk.d-i-y - and I learnt
about emacs gnus which is a usenet client in the 
terminal. One thing starts to lead to another.

Over time, sites like my space or fb took over
from the free web hosting and it died out.
And dialup died out too. There was a corporate
takeover of iol/iolfree. the telnet and usenet
were shut.

Now if you can imagine the iolfree tilde
server, abandoned, a decade after
everyone had left. The users all gone
to beebo and instegram. 

I kept updating my blog but they closed 
iolfree in 2020, so I got the tilde club 
account. 

In the terminal window now I was linking to
the remote computer and using the skills
I'd learnt on my iMac and learning a lot. 
You may have read how ~ford started tilde
club when he was drunk a decade ago.
I chose '~iolfree' the domain name of the 
former host as my username. The name seemed 
to stick.


Then I heard of gopher 
and tilde club introduced gopher:// there.
So I decided to set up home on gopher.
I was worried that the other gophers
would attack me for being new, or in the
way, but I was determined that I would do it 
anyway, and really go-for-it. As luck would 
have it, I was welcome.
EPILOGUE
Well that was how I came to be on gopher.
and here I hope to live out the rest
of my days in peace and quiet. 
I like the older generations of tech
and semi obsolete knowledge.
/ / /


iolfree