Thirty years Thirty years Thirty years

Before browsers had faces.

A Zenith Data Systems store opened beside Mid Century Leasing, my car-leasing business. That is where this started.

4–6 lines out of North Carolina. Sysadmin on my own board; beta-tested Wildcat! for years and worked booths at ONE BBSCON.

Grain lead database giving farmers current pricing. Their rep spent a week at my home standing it up — then bought my motorhome to haul the equipment back to Texas.

Before HTML settled the question, RIPscrip — TeleGrafix’s graphical protocol — looked like it might be the standard, and the CompuServe patent fight had everyone scared off GIF. I backed a workaround to move JPEG over the wire instead. It didn’t land in time; the panic burned itself out. Wrong bet, right room.

The boards ran on DOS. When Windows 95 took the space, we took them down.

First ISP in Western North Carolina.

Founded the first ISP in Western North Carolina. Farrington Development began the same year.

Just short of 20,000 subscribers at the sale.

Stood up ISPs for underserved rural communities from Indiana to South Carolina.

The paper was hers. The agency — and hundreds of launches — were mine.

Marjorie’s paper from day one — she ran it. I handled the admin side, which cost me little: it was the work I already did every day.

An independent agency, one operator: web development, CRM integrations, and SEO — twenty solid years of continuous client work, through every disruption the industry produced.

My own projects, shipped alongside the client work — hundreds of them over the years. Some still run. Some are shelved on GitHub. A few are on the bench waiting to be reconstituted.

The archive crosses twenty thousand published pieces.

The paper is rebuilt on a modern stack. NewsBreak grows to roughly 80% of traffic, overwhelmingly mobile.

The hinge year — the rebuild and AI arrived together.

The paper becomes a product.

The paper becomes a platform: multi-tenant, Next.js + Firebase + Vercel, multi-model pipeline with an anti-slop framework — source grounding, voice packs, second-pass linting, human editorial accountability.

Mid-April to mid-June: 17 papers across 16 markets run live — a load test of the stack and the AI pipeline behind every paper. A/B tested, finalized, prepared for launch.

SEO/AEO/GEO grading, then done-for-you remediation.

ElevenLabs roster — Doreen on the public site, Cheryl in the client portal.

OpenClaw forked at v5.20 under MIT. OCTI adds a plan-gated harness: every plan turn approved by a human before execution.

First live on-chain payment settled for a paid GetFound3 audit.

NewsroomAIOS and the Farrington Command Center go live.