Heterick and Erv and others perceived that, it would, well, we're going to have all these students that are hooked up to the CBX thing, and they're going to be used to using these, all these tools and facilities and access to library stuff and all kinds of things. But as soon as they move off campus, they won't have that. How the heck are we going to get access to people off campus? And they say, "Oh, well, we can have modem pool," and we're like, "Well, gee, it's going to be hard to run a modem pool for, you know, 15,000 people or something." What else can we do and what can we do to anticipate the way things are going to be connected in some period of time? And they got together with the town, they were interested in doing things at a local context. Okay? And so the town had lots of local information and needs to communicate local information, and, into like the local school districts and things like that. And the, uh, local phone company, which was Bell Atlantic originally later became Verizon. They were interested in the, well, what's it like running network facilities for people? Is this a business we even want to get into or not? How do we do it? Um, and so, through that whole mechanism they did things like put Ethernet connections in Foxridge and places like that, apartment complexes, as well as schools, uh, as well as the town library. Uh, which were originally there was like a what was called a T1 connection, which was about one megabit, I want to say. I'm not positive. So you ran that over the phone system to the place and with the right equipment, you could run an Ethernet network through the building and so students or whoever lived in the apartments and so forth, of course could hook up. And then there was also the modem pool. It was really Rube Goldberg, in a lot of ways, getting software to run in your computer that could hook up to the modem pool. So there was a lot of development work, yeah, that was needed in terms of just well, what, how can we kind of glue all this stuff together, these pieces that people could do the email that started out. I mean, Joe Wiencko is involved with early versions of that. Uh, I got involved with another early version of that. Uh, Andrew Cohill got involved who had worked with some other versions of packages of software. And there was this whole, do you remember the ERIS system? That kind of really got the ball rolling. I mean, the ERIS thing in particular, out of that came, uh, all of the enterprise groups and stuff like that that we use for access control and authentication these days. The tools to do that were originated in that work. That was where all this came from. Um, and it was all kind of this thing got developed and that thing got developed, and that thing got developed. It was a guy named Eddie Schwab in particular that worked for me that that developed some really neat stuff, that used, there was a lot of these little back end things, and this one could do that and that one could do that. But all of them could do this. And, but what we needed was a unified interface that we could manage all of those things. Like oh, we need to set up email for this person and hook them up to the network. And so there's like a bunch of little technical things that got to be plugged in, but have a unified interface to do it. And we put that together, which let us have the BEV office, which was located in a variety of places around town over the years where basically people could line up at the door and come in and get on the internet. Here's a diskette. Here's you know, you fill in this form, we're going to set you up and it's going to cost this much or I can't remember if they didn't charge for it originally or what, however, all the stuff worked. We developed, like we got had an office manual, you know, like, of procedures. This is the way you do this, this is what you do with that. And a long history of clerical people and technical people who did great stuff, really dedicated, hard work. And the thing, Andrew Cohill's role was instrumental in that. He was, he was out of the architecture school, uh,  graduate program. He was very good technically. He was very Mac-oriented. And so he kind of viewed things, it wasn't just about, it was Apple equipment, it was that he looked at things at that level, which was, I think, helpful. He was pretty visionary, technically, he worked well with Erv and his perceptions of things. He was an absolute wizard in terms of ginning up PR stuff. Once the whole thing broke, there were articles from here to Timbuktu. I mean there was like articles in Paris newspapers about, you know, the lady across town who, you know, whose husband was in poor health and couldn't leave the house. And she used to be a librarian and worked with the League of Women Voters, and she was able to do it from home. I was not PR oriented, uh, you know, that was the Andrew side of things and some other people. Uh, I was more of the systems guy, and my primary focus was really, uh, keep things running reliably, uh, have have something stable for people to use. And we did a pretty good job with that. It became a way to enable, to empower people to do things that they had never been able to do before. I mean, and we, that, at the time, that meant we were actually going around, I was going around to people's houses and helping them install software on their computers. You had to get out and push. I mean and I had personal friends that I helped with that who are just absolutely ecstatic. It's like, "I can communicate with this thing online in real time with my boyfriend in Germany without running up the damn phone bill." You know, we're not talking about voice, we're talking about like bidirectional chat. But it was like life changing. One of the big things that we discovered that came out of it was this is very valuable to older people. Particularly in a community like this where you have a lot of smart, technical older people, who got all of a sudden they have time in their lives to, you know, climb learning curve, to leverage something like that. And as far as the tapering off thing, it's kind of like corollary to that Einar Stefferoad Stefferud quote about, you know, the best kind of progress is the kind I have nothing to do with. It's like yeah, you have affection for the tools that got you there, but it's good to keep your head up, be aware of what else is emerging What are the new ways to do things? What are the advantages they present? And when you're working with a community of people that are, you know, engaged with something, and there's a lot of inertia about moving. And I'm, I mean the systems people at Tech will tell ya I'm very slow to change stuff and much to the frustration of some people who are running things that they would like me to get off of. [laughs] It's good to be able to adapt, and when you're working with that kind of a user community, the objective is to, to gradually fade away. It's like the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland" - nothing left but the smile.