I got on a year later, when I went to work for COBEX in St. Thomas. Peter de Blanc had recently set up shop as the very first ISP in the USVIs, and I happened to sail into Long Bay and was looking for work as a sysadmin - a match made in heaven. We were running the whole shebang over a double ISDN line that we were sharing with the local TV station ... yep, the whole island. Our access pretty much depended on how the guy who owned the station was feeling toward us that week, so it wasn't exactly the most stable business model in the world. Later on, I ran across a bunch of hard-hat guys in a bar near Magens Bay, and it turned out they were working on a transoceanic cable that had an onshore access point there. I somehow managed to convince them - no idea how, it was really drunk out at the time - to tap us in, and a week later (after some very confused conversations with the folks at Bell/Telcordia stateside; I think they finally hooked us up as an act of charity), our feed bandwidth went exponential - and we were no longer dependent on Cal whatsisname. Jesus, those were the wild days. P.S.: Well, dogshit. I did a bit of searching, and it looks like cancer killed Peter off a while back. Not that the guy was a friend - I worked for him, and he had a... character, let's just say... but that period and that job had quite an influence on my life. The man was a pioneer, and he had guts and vision. Not enough of his kind in the world.