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I write about growing up through the PC and Internet revolution in rural America here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america I talk about the difficulties of everything being long distance, #BBS, #UUCP, #PPP, escaping #Microsoft, #DOS, #Linux, #OS2, and Theo de Raadt. Thank you @kensanata and @szczezuja for prompting me to do this. I realize I may have written, uh, SLIGHTLY more than you were looking for 
@kensanata @szczezuja 2/ One of the things I want to highlight is how Theo de Raadt -- or, to be more precise, his attitude -- was a factor in driving me to Debian. I think #FLOSS communities are just now having an awakening to how bad poisonous people are and how harmful they are to their efforts. 16-year-old me could have told you that in 1996. Any number of people could tell you that now. I am grateful that this corner of Mastodon is such a positive space.
@kensanata @szczezuja 3/ I chose to return to a #rural area, and although I no longer have high long-distance bills, the disparity I have in Internet access compared to the people that live in a city 20 miles away is still more than an order of magnitude.
@kensanata @szczezuja And, of course, I do still run a #Gopher server. Gopher was my first experience with "live" Internet, after earlier gateways via #CompuServe (hello @eludom ) and #FidoNet, and getting email and #Usenet via #UUCP when I was 15.
@kensanata @szczezuja @eludom And finally, don't be like Theo. You never know who is on the other end of your flame. Maybe it's a 14- or 16-yr-old kid like I was when Theo flamed me. These days it could be a 10-yr-old. Or it could be an adult dipping their toes in the water for the first time. Who knows. Show #kindness. /end
@jgoerzen @kensanata @szczezuja "Theo" as in OpenBSD Theo? I caught some time with him at a restaurant at a USENIX conference once (90s?) ... at the time I was toying with my own /bin/ed implementation (in, I think, MS-DOS). Theo launched into an exposition on the merits and demerits of several different /bin/ed implementations in different Unix code bases. His knowledge of the code base was encyclopedic. Amazing.
@eludom @kensanata @szczezuja Yep, that's the one. I could believe that indeed. I think as a community though we have to be less tolerant of people that are poisonous, regardless of their technical skill.