I'm a nice Canadian boy in my early 30's and the Eternal Bachelor. Some people have accused me of having eclectic interests, (although I think its just a nice way of saying that I'm messed up) but I like to think of myself as a well-rounded person with eccentric and sardonic tendencies.

I also possess several technical skills, including; a college diploma as "Forestry Technician" from Algonquin College, a Graphic Design certificate from Humber College, and various bits of schooling in photography, architectural drafting, mechanical drafting, and Computer Aided Design.

You might say I'm a Jack-of-All- Trades, yet master of none, as the saying goes. I can usually pick up on a new skill fairly quickly (HTML for example) as long as it holds my interest, and I often juggle several interests at once.

So why Hellspawn?

So, who is this guy with a name like "Hellspawn"?

Well, I began playing around with computers in the early 80's when I was about 14 or 15 yrs old. My first experience in "high-tech computing" was on a Commodore PET computer in Computer Science class, programming in BASIC and Waterloo-BASIC... "Cutting edge" stuff! Later, I managed to buy myself a Commodore 64 and began to fool around with it at home, playing games mostly, while moving on to new and improved language in school; FORTRAN! Programming in FORTRAN was fun, especially since we had to use punch cards to write out our programs, and send them off to the school board to be run... I think I still have some laying around.

A few years later, I think it was around 1985, I picked up a relatively new device for personal computers; a modem. We had learned about modems in computer class of course, but they had been the sort that you had to take the telephone receiver and clip it rubber cups so that the computer could talk to it directly, I believe they were called acoustic modems. In any case, I took my mighty 300 baud modem in hand and I joined the "information age"...

I had to search for a "suitably cool-sounding" name when I first began BBS'ing, and I finally settled on "The Evil One" after trying a couple others, as my AD&D buddies were constantly telling me how I was always evil and devious when I played. So, I became known widely as The Evil One, or "TEO" for short, and preceded to make a name for myself in the BBS world. I fooled around for a couple years on various BBS'es, becoming known best on "Aerie Weyr" (I believe that's how it was spelled, its been years), until I found a BBS called "Metropolis", a pay-for-play BBS.

Metropolis was a whole NEW kind of BBS experience -- It was multi-user. My first thoughts were something like, "Why would anyone want a multi-line BBS?" that is, until I found the 'teleconference'. Metropolis was also where "Hellspawn" was born (see, I finally got to it), as "Metro" would only allow user ID's of 9 characters or less. Soon, I found myself constantly involved in this multi-line experience, talking (or typing) for hours to people I never met before, or playing the new multi-user interactive games like InFiNiTy CoMpLeX. Woo! Talk about your high-tech!

Around the same time that I discovered Metro, I figured out that running a BBS wasn't so tough, and I put up my own place known simply as "Hades". Hades was lots of fun to create, running on my C64 using something called the "FRP BBS" freeware package, and catered mostly to people like me who enjoyed Role-Playing games. Hades ran for about 4 or 5 years, first on the FRP software, and then I progressed to something called the M1BBS when Hades became too big for my 2 1541 disk drives (1541's were 5.25" disk drives that could hold about 400k of information) to handle. My hardware also also grew and I managed to collect an SFD-1001 (a 5.25" disk that could hold 1 Meg), an old Commodore 8081 (a dual 5.25" drive that could hold 1 Meg total), a Commodore 1581 (a new 3.5" drive that could hold around 880k), and a 1200 baud modem. Now I was cooking with gas!

In the later 80's, BBS'ing became more and more popular and the little 1 line BBSes began to die off in favor of the bigger, better multi-line boards. My interest in keeping Hades up began to die out, and so did my user's interests, since they could find more on the bigger BBSes, and I finally took it down and became "Hellspawn" full-time. During this time, Metro was also having some cash-flow problems; it had become too big for it's own good, expanding to something like 24 business lines, and soon I had to find other multi-line BBS experiences to amuse myself as Metro began to fall in upon itself...

My BBS "career" took a bit of a dive in the early 90's when I decided to go back to school after working for a while, and I went out of circulation. While I was in school, I also managed to upgrade my equipment from the C64 to a Commodore Amiga 2000, although some don't think this is much of an upgrade, and a 2400 baud modem. When I finally graduated in '92 and came back to BBSing, the Internet was in its infancy, something "new" to play with, but I didn't become really involved in it until about '95 when I borrowed a friend's account to "surf the 'Net" for the first time...

Now I have myself some new toys, a Pentium III 450, Windows 98 Second Edition, and all the bells and whistles that go with having a computer in the year 2000...