Posted on 10/23/2018 10:30:55 AM PDT by M Kehoe
Good afternoon.
My name is Mike Kehoe. I am FReeper number 13,500 and I was born on October 23, 1998.
Like many FReepers, I found Jim Robinson's house through a link from Drudge. It was March 1998 and Jim's house had all kinds of problems. From the flame wars to the Whitehouse basement. From the Italians (html) which produced chaos in the Forum, to funding a website which was experiencing a BOOM in growth.
I thought at the time, I'm not signing up here to post, it is dangerous (along with death threats and lawsuits).
So along comes FR's March for Justice. These FReepers are attempting to help the impeachment of a sitting president. They are a serious bunch. Woohoo! I got to sign up...
In the last twenty years I have been to many Freeps (helped save the 2000 election), made many Friends and broke bread with some of the best people on the planet. The First lady and me have met at least four hundred FReepers over 20 years and many are still alive.
FR has been a force in our history. From dispatching lying journalists to primaring RINOs, we have made a difference in our nation's politics and culture.
I have enjoyed FR more than any other website on the internet. Thanks JimRob.
One more thing. Ever since I signed up, I have made it a point to donate to FR to keep the doors open. I believe it has been worth it.
May the Lord bless all FReepers and especially bless Jim, John and their families. Amen.
Same here. I was one of the original Freepers (I'm talking the first week it started) but changed my screen name a few months later so my join date got reset. I seem to remember I was still number #400 with my new screen name.
Jim Robinson himself called me up to get my opinion on starting the Free Republic. At the time, we were posting together on the Prodigy Whitewater BB and we were told to stop posting original articles. We were running into too much repression there, man!
Now those were the days. I used to actually hand-type American Spectator and NY Post articles into the BB because those publications didn't even have a website yet.
Reason I changed screen names was because I was using my real name and I was concerned that somebody at work would notice and report me to HR. Also, SamAdams76 was much more catchier!
Piker.
I was on Free Republic 457 years before the Internet was invented.
I believe it. And you were hitting on The Ugly Duchess, I’m sure!
That’s not exactly true. That only applies to your membership on the FreeRepublic Facebook Group.
I was a submarine pilot Jumpmaster sniper, specializing in Military intelligence countermeasures in covert HALO insertions via SEAL technology drone operation. My NBC certification was for tanker gunner E6 Specialist radio operations logistics, Humvee driver linguist. During this time, I was deployed into China during the Crimean War, where I was a EOD specialist corporal private major cryptographer.
She was hawt.
My Freeper Birthday is November 7 1998
It has been a long strange trip.
Happy to be here still.
Hey where did that thing go, you wrote..?
It was amazing:
You were citing how things were in FR, back in the day, ‘cept we used HYROGLYPHICS, and BTTT actually stood for (then you made up something really funny).
And with each iteration, you went back further and further.
It was like 1500 words and hilarious, even by your standards.
You remember that?
I guess it was 10 years back, maybe.
PEED MY PANTS..!!
I got it somewhere. I might post it again and go into the future.
Thank you, Mike!
W
Mcmuffin hasn't responded for some time to e-mails; there was talk he might be moved to Huntsville, Ala.; seekthetruth is around, at least recently; when MinuteGal went silent she helped to track down the story; I got an e-mail from JulieRNR21 yesterday, nothing personal but she is campaigning for FL GOP! In the 2016 Prez campaign she sent a pic of her & DJT! Wow, are we FL FReepers like fly paper or what?!
That's it! I have been telling folk it was originally from a bulletin board, or from a Whitewater something... you have reactivated corroded brain cells! 😂 Prodigy did a miraculous thing but didn't know it!
Where is Prodigy now? Where is FR now?! HA HA!
I had to learn html because my FR posts were gibberish... probably still are. Now I have my own domain and at least four books published on the web (hopefully not too much gibberish!) FR changed my life... web-wise at any rate. I have always said that html is technology's way of making you type four times as much to say twice as little.
Greetings, soldier!
Anyways, we had our primitive (then) website up on the projector and in view of all, I got into the source code and started setting up hyperlinks, inserting images and doing other formatting to the site on the fly. Everybody's mouths hung open and at least for a little while, I became webmaster and internet guru for the entire company!
Today, I'm with the same company and we now have a full fledged IT department with about a hundred people who can run circles around me but for a brief shining moment, I was the MAN!
Somewhere in my basement, I have a stack of floppy disks holding the contents of that Prodigy Whitewater BB featuring the posts of people like Judith Pedgrift, Larry Barleen and Karen Bixman.
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That was a day to remember.
FreeRepublic was the best source of information that day. We had Freepers on the ground in NYC and in Washington, DC. According to those eye/ear witness reports here there were explosions that day in DC. Also there was a line of trash barrels on fire and their line of smoke led to the Capital building. What a day.
BTW I don't think quidam was a fraud. I wonder if he was actually Drudge trolling for confirmation of rumors.
Well, ya still qualify here!
***Somewhere in my basement, I have a stack of floppy disks holding the contents of that Prodigy Whitewater BB***
I hope you have better luck than I; a HD and two backup CDs crapped out and I lost a big chunk of my archive material. I keep constructing thumb drives and SD cards now.
Same b-day. Are we twins?
Congratulations for your enduring FR tenure, Leni! You are a gem. Praying that you will be with us for a long, long time because your thoughtful, witty, poetic posts are awe inspiring!
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