fat: adjective: richly rewarding or profitable; practically nonexistent
hippo: noun: A hippopotamus.
About the author (short version): I’m 33 years old, married with two children (both boys ages 7 and 3). I work as a computer network analyst, specializing and computer security (corperate firewalls & vpns).
About the author (long version): The first computer i ever came into contact with was in 3rd grade, it was a TRS-80 Model II running TRS-DOS. I recall countless hours of Oregon Trail! For Christmas that year, my father bought the family a TRS-80 Color Computer ("Coco"). By 5th grade we "upgraded" to a TRS-80 Model III and subsequently the TRS-80 Model IV and IVp ("p" for Portable, but the thing weighted 60 pounds and was the size of a 19 inch television) with a modem! 
The modem meant an introduction to the BBS. An experience that would change my life profoundly.
Moving right along into middle school, two of my main teachers were Mac-heads. So i was introduced to the Apple Macintosh II, IIe and the mouse!
High school introduced the first PC computer. Our high school lab was stocked with a dozen or so IBM 5150s running PC-DOS.
By the time i was a senior, i had upgraded to a Tandy 1000 with dual 3.5" floppy drives and a color monitor. Later it was upgraded with a 20MB hard drive. Up until this point the 1000 ran MS-DOS 2.x, but we were required to upgrade to allow DOS to see the gigantic 20MB hard drive.
Ahhh… College, the land of free flowing beer, sex, drugs (don’t worry Mom, i didn’t expirement that much) and of course, debt. Freshman year, what memories!
Next comes the Wang 386 PC running Windows 3.0. I paid $1200 for it, using my first ever credit card. I swear i’m still paying for that computer somehow. Add to that a 14.4k modem and we’re screaming on the Internet for the first time via CompuServe (circa 1992-1993). Windows 3.1 followed with RAM upgrades from the stock 2MB all the way up to 8MB. I saved up cash fixing other students computers in my dorm. And also got many favors from the "RA" (Resident Assitant) who would look the other way when i was carrying illegal contraband (read: booze) into the dorms.
Freshman year changed my life. I was studying to become a history teacher, but quickly realized that my love of computers outweighted my love of history.
I transferred to a college that had a two computer networking degree, it was also close to my parent’s home so i lived there and studied my ass off (way less partying). With the skills i had built up over the previous years, i was able to "test out" of many of my classes. That is, i was able to arrange to take a "skills test" that covered everything the course covered. If you got a certain score, you didn’t have to attend class but still got credit for it (and sadly, yes, still paid full price).
In 1994 i bought a second hand 286 motherboard from a friend and built my first "home-brewed" system. Less powerful than my 386, this machine would become The Mos Eisley Spaceport BBS or "MES".
MES was wildly successful, focused on discussion (everything from Gaming, politics and music) and file downloads, MES boasted well over 100 users during its heyday and had its very own dedicated phone line so the board was up and running 24/7. Our message boards were linked into two nationwide board systems that allowed MES users to discuss topics of interest with people in Chicago, California and places in between.
As my own "main" computer was upgraded, so was MES. When my 386 was replaced by a home-brewed 486, the Wang 386 became MES. And when that 486 was replaced by a Pentium 66, the 486 Became MES. In 1997, i got serious with my girlfriend at the time and moved into our own place. The BBS was starting to waiver as the Internet became more and more popular. At the time, MES was running on a Pentium II 266Mhz with 256 MB ram and Windows 95. In November 1997, MES BBS was taken down and the message boards were moved to the internet.
MES on the Web was hosted by tatooine.com which is a domain my brother purchased. A few years after registration, he was forced to give up the domain by George Lucas and lawyers. Around the same time, our tight-nit community was starting to split up and the web version of MES was shutdown.
(more to come, it’s a work in progres….)