---
title: Welcome!
description: Welcome to the Wild Cloud tutorial!
date: 2025-07-13
tags:
- tutorial
---

Hi! I'm Paul.

Welcome! I am SO excited you're here!

Why am I so excited?? When I was an eight year old kid, I had a computer named the Commodore64. One of the coolest things about it was that it came with a User Manual that told you all about how to not just use that computer, but to actually _use computers_. It taught me how to write my own programs and run them! That experience of wonder, that I could write something and have it do something, is the single biggest reason why I have spent the last 40 years working with computers.

When I was 12, I found out I could plug a cartridge into the back of my Commodore, plug a telephone line into it (maybe some of you don't even know what that is anymore!), and _actually call_ other people's computers in my city. We developed such a sense of community, connecting our computers together and leaving each other messages about the things we were thinking. It was a tiny taste of the early Internet.

I had a similar experience when I was 19 and installed something called the "World Wide Web" on the computers I managed in a computer lab at college. My heart skipped a beat when I clicked on a few "links" and actually saw an image from a computer in Europe just magically appear on my screen! It felt like I was teleported to the other side of the world. Pretty amazing for a kid who had rarely been out of Nebraska!

Everything in those days was basically free. My Commodore cost $200, people connected to each other out of pure curiosity. If you wanted to be a presence on the Internet, you could just connect your computer to it and people around the world could visit you! _All_ of the early websites were entirely non-commercial. No ads! No sign-ups! No monthly subscription fees! It felt like the whole world was coming together to build something amazing for everyone.

Of course, as we all know, it didn't stay that way. After college, I had to figure out ways to pay for Internet connections myself. At some point search engines decided to make money by selling ads on their pages... and then providing ad services to other pages--"monetize" they called it. Then commercial companies found out about it and wanted to sell books and shoes to other people, and the government decided they wanted to capture that tax money. Instead of making the free and open software better, and the open communities stronger, and encouraging people to participate by running their own computers and software, companies started offering people to connect _inside_ their controlled computers. "Hey! You don't have to do all that stuff" they would say, "You can just jump on our servers for free!".

So people stopped being curious about what we could do with our computers together, and they got a login name, and they couldn't do their own things on their own computers anymore, and their data became the property of the company whose computer they were using, and those companies started working together to make it faster to go to their own computers, and to make it go very, very, slow if you wanted to let people come to your computer, or even to forbid having people come to your computer entirely. So now, we are _safe_ and _simple_ and _secure_ and we get whatever the companies want to give us, which seems to usually be ads (so many ads) or monthly fee increases, and they really, really, love getting our attention and putting it where they want it. Mostly, it's just all so... boring. So boring.

So, why am I excited you're here? Because with this project, this Wild Cloud project, I think I just might be able to pass on some of that sense of wonder that captured me so many years ago!