Home Pagethought.org had it beginnings in Western Wisconsin in 1986 as a small Public Access Unix site --[it was System V.2 AT&T UNIX]-- connected via a long-distance telephone link in California to the Arpanet. Fewer than 20 people dialed in to my system a day to send mail and read netnews. I registered the domain thought.org in April, 1994 with a promised dedicated IP designation from Tera Computer Company. With a 28.8k dial-up I was connected to the Internet by the end of that April. I didn't launch an HTTP daemon until the late 1990's mostly because of the bandwidth limitations--even tho most of my early pages were all text-based. Sometime after Tera Computer morphed into "Cray Inc" (sic) and I had to cough up the money for my own network link, I thought.org moved from 28.8k to 144kbps: around March, 2001. This is still an extremely narrow straw, but serves well since there are relatively few graphics on this domain.
Today I run Berkeley Unix and, more recently, Ubuntu, over a small local network and serve a few local (and distant) people. Current Web stats show roughly 100K hits/year.
thought.org has always been dedicated to serve the intelligent public---either as a public-access or public-service site. After I was 9/11'd out of my programming job, I began my third life-career in philosophy: Ethics. With this change of focus, the site has also turned more toward thoughts-computer [and whatever else, related], to thoughts-philosophical. Focused on the ethical and trans-ethical, toward reaching the summun bonum. To this end, I am in the midst of creating virtual sites, philosophy.thought.org, for the furthering of All Things Ethical. --Among the other virtual sights will be wright.thought.org that will contain as many of the writings of Henry Wilkes Wright as I can scan and publish in HTML. (H.W.Wright was, by my reckoning, one of the top ethicists of the Twentieth Century.) As this blue marble of ours fractures increasingly along ethnic, religious, racial, and philosophical lines--however thin these lines may be--I believe that it's time to put our emotions on Pause and Think. It is time to read, to reason, and to reach across the lines of division. I hope to have a message board for people to offer their feedback to news items or express their views on myriad other subjects. And other things. Thoughts abound. I hope the leading thinkers of this new century will share their work (in HTML) on the coming virtual philosophy pages. These are days for reflection, not reaction... . It's going to be an intriguing next several years, so stay tuned!
Who am I (Gary Kline)? I was born at the end of World War II and wound up being the only severely- and multiply-disabled electrical engineer and computer scientist to have graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. If you want to see how some people can make simple-minded, biased and ironic prejudicial statements, check out the microscopically thin-slice of my bio from yester-century, Here .
After many years of my computer geekdom, after my lay-off, because of age and other factors, when I realized that finding another programming job was virtually NULL (and being too young to "retire"), I decided to go back to school. My latest geek target is philosophy--Ethics. I've got some interesting theories involving free will and chaos/complexity. Self-realization. We'll see what happens... . January, 2005