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Along toward the end of 1995 I expressed concern that we didn't have a website yet, nor even internet access, so my spouse said "so, sign up with something".

In those days you had several places to go ~ one of them was AOL, so we signed up and discovered they had some discussion boards. My wife joined up as one of the first members of the one that became known as "the pod".

I found Doonesbury ~ which was one of the first open sites on the internet. You didn't have to go through a service like AOL or Compuserv to get to it, and you didn't need to try to figure out the various "net" text boards left over from before the internet started oozing into existence.

It was 1996 and we were having our Fall Marketing meeting at the USPS training center up in Potomac MD. I recall I got a nice "bonus" (ha! a bonus so nigglingly cheap that you private sector people would call it a "tip"). I went onto my AOL site (through Erols) and found a reference to FreeRepublic on Compuserv. They provided the "numbers" for the URL (we didn't all have "names" for our websites in those days. There was some sort of portal and I tried linking. By December of 1996 with the assistance of my eldest son we achieved satori with a crossover to the earlier FreeRepublic site through Erols (he worked at Erols in fact, and this wasn't a trivial matter ~ more a work of genius at that time).

Anyway, I got a name at FR, not an ID# (which makes me think we were one of the earliest users at the open site), and by some time in 1997, when Matt Drudge went on the net with his Drudgereport I think we went through the first major transformation and were on again/off again as a website being referenced through Drudgereport. That continued to early 1998.

People were all the time bemoaning the fact that Drudge kept dropping our FR name. I think Jim was overwhelmed with the incredible number of signups so we weren't suffering for readers or participants.

Then they had everybody re signup!

That's where my 1998 signup info comes from.

In 1997 I LOST my URL to link to FreeRepublic for a couple of months. I panicked!

I vowed that "I will never be delinked again" ~ and stored it all over the place ~ and then next thing you know all the internet search sites started carrying everybody's everything so you couldn't possibly lose your link.