Ted Gresham’s Online Portal
The first time I ever fiddled with a computer was in college when I played with an old Apple machine writing simple code to make ascii art appear on the screen. It was fun. By the end of the eighties PCs were coming on the market; I had to have one. I bought a PC Clone (A clone was a generic brand machine that “cloned” the IBM PC). That monster cost three thousand bucks! It had an amber screen, monochrome of course, two five and a half inch floppy drives (98.5 Kilobyte of storage), keyboard and mouse. It did not have any kind of internal drive.
In stages I added a dot-matrix printer, a 20 Megabyte hard drive, and a 4.8 bps modem.
That first machine kept me busy for years. I actually made a portable stand for it and lugged it back and forth from Corpus Christi to Lufkin and back. I soon discovered BBS systems and dialed them up all the time. Being the religious nut I was, I wanted a bible on my computer. I downloaded one, a plain text file that took all night to download. Wow. I actually still have that old machine though critters made a mess of it while it was in storage.
Modems got faster. Computers got faster and cheaper. The internet came along. My desktop went right along with it all. I have no idea how many computers I’ve gone through from then to now. Dozens for sure. Today I bang around on an old Dell laptop I’ve had for years but would have seemed like scifi to the 1980s me.
When the ability to create personal websites came along, I was on it like flies on shit. Through the years I had many personal websites and blogs. Some of that old stuff is still out there, haunting the corners of the web. There has been very few times in the past thirty years that I didn’t have an online presence. Most of them had a lot to do with my writing (subject for another day) but were sometimes political, sometimes poetic, and sometimes just weird.
A couple years ago I reached a point that I was just tired of the whole mess. Depression and frustration, coupled with a tight budget, led me to dump everything. From then until recently only those old WordPress blogs were around to give insight into my not-so-great mind. Those and a couple social-media sites like Facebook, etc..
This past summer the presidential election began to freak me out. I started making memes and graphics, and then informative videos. When I had a little collection of those things I figured I needed to put them online somewhere. Logic said create a new website. Then came the election itself and America betrayed itself. All the massive effort to rescue the country was nothing more than pissing in the wind. Time for the next chapter.
From this point forward this website will be a site of protest against the disgusting and horrible not-entirely-human Donald J. Trump and the evil minions who kiss his ass. Further, it is an expression of disgust towards those who were beyond foolish enough to vote the bastard in again.
I will never forgive nor forget!
