Karl Strieby
Knowledgeable-Computer-Professional

Previous versions of this web site spoke in the first person plural ("we", "us", etc.) just like grand pretentious companies do. We called ourselves "Knowledgeable Computer Professionals" as if we were a swarm of super-geeks ready to tackle a host of IT problems for our customers.

That was not true.

K-C-P.com has never been more than --

• little old me,
• my computer(s) and other gadgets of the day, and
• whichever of several cats might be on my lap and/or trying to position itself between my face and the screen (also known as "helping").

Hmm, now that I look at that list again, I guess you could call that agglomeration a "we". Sort of, if "we" were all humans.

• Nope, from now on, it is me, myself and I who does stuff around here.
• No more phantom "we-s" or "us-s" or "our" etc.
• Unless a cat steps on the keyboard or mouse...AKA "helping" again...

So what about little old me?

To make a long story short, I've been "on the internet" since 1988. That means I have been able to witness the wild growth of the network over time.

At first, my connection was via amateur radio digital packet radio. Later the University of Manitoba opened "MBNet" which provided the first public dial-up internet service to Manitobans.

Back then, text-only protocols like "finger", "gopher" and "telnet", "network news (NNTP)" "e-mail" and binary or text FTP (file transfer protocol) were all you could do. This was actually very useful, but then...

In 1992, along came this program called Mosaic, which I installed and managed to get running on Windows 3.0. Amazing...

There were these new resources called "web sites" that Mosaic could connect to. Thanks to something called "HTML", you would click on "links" to see related information. Even on a different web site.

• How cool was that? In 1992?
• (Uh, very!)
• (Have you ever used Gopher? Enough said...)

Mosaic had this extra little command called "view source" that let you instantly see how the web page you were looking at was encoded. (All modern web browsers still have this feature.) The first time I did a "view source" I had an epiphany.

At the time, one of my most often used computer program was Word Perfect 4 for DOS. And whenever my Word Perfect documents had formatting issues, I had learned to turn on "Reveal Codes" to troubleshoot the problem.

Coincidence or Fate?

Word Perfect created documents based on the same SGML markup language that Tim Berners-Lee adopted for HTML version 1. So HTML instantly sort of made sense to me, based on my experience with troubleshooting mangled Word Perfect files.

• How cool was that?

Please note that I was not an HTML expert in 1996. And I will still never claim to know "everything" about web design and web standards today.

The topic is huge and growing exponentially. Always having new stuff to learn = geek joy!

Back when my friend Patricia Spencer asked me if I knew anyone who could make a web site. I responded, "Funny you should ask! I have just started tinkering with making web pages, and wouldn't mind learning more".

Since then, the Web has become my passion, my creative outlet, and just plain fun.

My K-C-P.com web business is not a full-time thing: I have a professional IT support day job at a fabulous employer that keeps me hopping from 07:30 to 15:30 Central Time most weekdays.

• The rest of my time (evenings, weekends, minus time needed for "having a life") is mine
• Or yours, if I'm working for you.