Hi there, my name is Ken Toulou and I live in Price, Utah. I have been here since 1978 when I moved to Utah from Marysville, California.
I went to work as a coal miner as soon as I got to Utah in 1978 and I worked in the mines until about 1998.
I got the computer bug in the early 80′s and bought a Timex/Sinclair 1000 for about $100. I had to have one to see what this computer thing was all about. I had to type the programs into it and then I couldn’t save them until I bought a cassette tape deck.
Well that was fun for a while, but I decided to upgrade to a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive so I would have some real computing power to work with. I joined a Commodore Club and found out that there was a way to connect to computer systems, called BBS’s over the telephone lines.
Well now I had to have a modem. I think that the modem ran at 300 baud so things moved really slow with this system. To make things worse we didn’t have any BBS systems in Price Utah. I had to call long distance to get a connection, and at 300 boud it was easy to burn up some long distance time.
My next upgrade was to a 386SX Intel PC system. I think that it came with 1 MB of ram and a 40 Mb hard drive. I ended up installing a bigger hard drive and more memory in that computer and setting it up as a BBS in Price. Now people in my area had a computer to connect to and download public domain programs and files.
After a couple of years the Internet came to town and I gave up the BBS.
I had been fixing computers for people through much of this time so I ended up opening a computer store around 1995. I worked nights in the coal mine and ran my business during the day. After I quit the mines I worked full time in my computer store until about 2006.
This is my son...
Ken Toulou
