I met my best friend in 1992 at a Commodore Users Group meeting in Tempe, Mesa, or Phoenix (I don't remember exactly where it was), Arizona, USA. He ran a Commodore 128 BBS before I did, but I ended up being the one that rewrote all the BASIC code for both of our bulletin boards. When I took mine down in 1998, he left his running for probably 5 more years.
In 1994 or early 1995 (again, my memory just doesn't serve me), we both got hooked up to the Internet from our IBM-compatible computers for the first time. I had been on the Internet before, when email addresses consisted of names and IP addresses — when the DNS system wasn't in place yet. I had done it though Genie, an online service that looked a lot like a UNIX command prompt. My computer, with the monitor and dial-up modem, ran me $2,400 and it was a piece of junk. His computer was a little older and had cost him almost $3,000. I was still in the military, stationed at the recruiting station in Phoenix. He was a contracted bus driver for the airport. He's STILL a bus driver for the airport.
His name is Tim Allen, but he's obviously not the actor of the same name. Tim didn't get along with his own large family very well, but he got along with mine just fine. He spent most of his weekends coming over to my house after I bought it in 1994. From 1996 to 1998, I was stationed in California, so we didn't have much to do with other in person. We still kept in touch via email and some older IM, I think it was called PowWow. After I retired in 1998, he was around the house much more.
Tim is my contact in the United States. I use his address and telephone number for anything that I need to have U.S.-based. After all, I'm still a U.S. citizen — I'm just living in the Philippines. Since I've been here, he's mailed checks to me that came in after I left and he's mailed the scanned copies of my taxes for filing (just the pages that had to be signed because the rest was in a database file). When my mother-in-law received her annual 401K check, he mailed that to us. Each time, he used express mail and paid out of pocket. He's the guy who loaned me the money to switch my hosting this time.
Tim has lived in the same apartment for about 30 years. His wing is scheduled for demolition soon and the owner of the complex likes him so much, he's moving him to another wing and taking the apartment number with him. He'll probably live there until he retires. He's about 8 years older than I, but still has a while before he can collect his social security and 401K distributions (11 years would be a good guess).
The things I've told you here are only a fraction of the things that we did together. I didn't mention how I helped him out because he remembers things that I don't. Some things I just do for people and then erase them from my thoughts because I don't expect anything in return. Besides, he's been single all his life and has probably helped me much more than I ever helped him. I think his involvement with my family is all he really cared about anyway. I just dug out a picture of him, taken at least 12 years ago. He doesn't sport the mustache and his hair is more the color gray than anything else now:
