I started on my online experience back in 1994. My dad gave me his pc after he upgraded. It was my first. Like most ignorant novices, I had my first online experience with AOL. I also wasted valuable money trying Prodigy, Compuserve and even MSN. But I settled with AOL for about 3 years. It was all I knew, just AOL that is, pretty good service I thought. In the mean time, I upgraded to a new Packard Bell, with a whopping 9600 modem. At this time in my cyber life, I was unaware of the world of personal web pages. Well time moved on, and I bought some components and built my own pc. What a trip. It actually worked. Something happened to me while with AOL, and there was a customer service problem that we fixed, but it seems that the billing department and customer service do not get along, as I was told I could not use my 3 year old screen name and we all know how it is too loose one's identity, I emailed and phoned AOL. All to no avail. They could not give me back my screen name(s) and I lost all email and the infant home page I had created. SO -- I signed up with SWB internet and I have been with them until today, I cancelled that service, effective 30 September 1998. Well my time with SWB was very good, I had no problems with them at all, I put up my first web page and ended up with about 46 different HTML files on the server. I quit them because they went from unlimited to 150 hours a month and increased the price to boot. I did the standard things, counters, guestbooks, links, link exchanges, endless animated gifs, more bells and whistles than should be allowed. I grew into the Web Ring mode next. Well as evolution goes, I had to have my own domain, since I could/can't afford to be an ISP, I figure its the next best thing. My own domain. I hope I have learned a lttle in the 4 and a half years of playing on the www. I don't join web rings anymore, I have my own. I have decided counters are not of much value, so I am weening my pages off of them as I update, same with web rings, they will eventually die like pigs. What does eXpungent mean? Well it means to destroy or blot out. What better name for my web page creations. It dates back to a little club some of my friends and I formed in the neighborhood -- membership cards and all (thats why I remembered it, I still have mine, of course I was the president). I hope I have grown out of the novice stage of web page mania, I now cringe when I visit pages that are in some early stage of growth. I can sympathize with those who thought my early productions took all day to load up. I have no patience, I need a faster modem, ISDN is next. Oh well I hope you enjoy my hobby. I do. Not ISDN, but cable modem, been online with cable modem since September 99, fast, really fast.