Biography of Robert Kluver

I was born on May 5th, 1973 (Cinco de Mayo) in Baltimore, Maryland, and my first day - was almost my last. Coming into this world two months premature, my right lung collapsed, requiring a helicopter ride to what is now John Hopkins Bayview Hospital in Baltimore, then known as City Hospital, where doctors had saved my life. In 1992, revisiting this hospital for an electrical burn injury, several nurses still on staff remembered me as the "miracle baby".

At the age of 3, my mother left my sister and I with my father who was unable to care for us on his own, with little help from family. He had little choice but to place us in foster care. After almost a year, my mother returned with her new boyfriend and removed us from the foster home and transported us to Brooklyn, in the State of New York. At the age of 6 I received my first personal computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000, and I instantly fell in love with computing.

As a young child growing up in Brooklyn, life was extremely tough. Racial and ethnic violence during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including gang and turf wars unfortunately took place all around me, and on several occassions I was beaten by large groups of older children simply for walking or riding the bus in the 'wrong' neighborhood. The fact that my first step-father was an abusive alocoholic did not help the situation. In the foyer of our victorian Brooklyn home however, I found some peace and solace at the desk where my Commodore Vic 20 and TRS-80 gave me an escape.

By the time I was just 8 years old, unlike other children on my block who were outside playing stickball, I was connecting to machines all over the United States using a 300 baud modem, the ancient kind, where you placed the telephone handset on top of the huge external modem cradle. This allowed me to travel, without every actually getting out of my chair, into a vast world of text and code which I found fascinating. I quickly mastered these systems and was ready to move on. I was accepted to the Paul Robeson High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the requirements for graduation was to build a computer. Unfortunately, I was never able to attend. That year, my mother left my first stepfather and moved us in with my soon to be second step-father, a change in my life that I was not ready for. Unable to accept the situation, my mother agreed to place me in a group home in Pleasantville, New York where I spent the remainder of my teenaged years.

You were not permitted to own or have your own things at Pleasantville, and that meant the only computers I was able to use were at school. It was as if I lost not only my family, I had also lost my best friend, my own personal computer. Unfortunately back then, there was only a single high school class, learning on the IBM PS/1. I longed for more. After graduating High School a U.S. Army recruiter convinced me to train on computers while servinng my country, an offer I gladly accepted. Military "Computers" however, were an entirely different breed of electronic devices. I trained in the field of secure, encrypted tactical communications and learned how to setup and deploy such a network during combat operations across an entire battlefield in less than 3 hours from getting boots on the ground. After several years, I was finally promoted to a non-commisioned officer and began training new soldiers on the use of the new technology behind "Taskforce 21", a dramatic change to modern warfare. Now, our combat troops were armed with mobile, secure tactical communications which also enabled commanders and even the oval office to connect to equipped soldiers in the field to pass orders and view the situation on the ground from thousands of miles away.

My military career lasted 8 years, from my birthday in 1992 until my honorable discharge on May 5th, 2000. Originally, I had enlisted in the Maryland National Guard, but also spent 2 years on active duty and several in the Army Reserves. This allowed me some time to get re-acquainted with the home computer and explore other options. I took a civilian job with Ericsson Radio, a swedish company which manufactured equipment used for cellular communications. I trained in Plano, Texas and became a certfied Radio base station engineer and returned to the East Coast to deploy the AT&T Wirless infrastructure from Boston to Atlanta. As a hobby, I also began the Magic Dragon BBS (Bulletin Board System) using Syncronet and Wildcat software.

The Montgomery G.I. Bill allowed me to attend a local community college in Dundalk Maryland where I acquired three Associate in Arts degrees in Business Administration, Supervisory Management and Accounting. These were skill sets that I desired to expand my own entrepreneurial aspirations. While at the college I also founded the Entrepreneur Club of Dundalk, held a position on the College Senate and Co-curricular Planning Board. I also maintained a 4.0 GPA and held a membership in the Honor's Society.

During the mid 1990s, my BBS system had grown in its number of subscribers. I had networked our system with Fidonet, a message exchange system used long before modern day electonic mail (email). I had also made arrangements with other BBS owners across the State of Maryland to join forces with me to create a statewide network. This network would be called, the Maryland Online Network, Rught around this same time, development of a new protocol, the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) was underway. This was a method where a new markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) could be used to represent and style text and graphics on the screen within a GUI (Graphical User Interface) environment, served over a network connection. The world of text based online interfaces and block style ANSI artwork was changing.

The makers of the Wildcat BBS software release its first Microsoft Windows application and environment capable of using this new protocol and markup language during the same time developers of the first Mozilla release. And of course, I mastered these technologies quickly and deployed them to connect our BBS users to the new "World Wide Web". This change in technology, opeed the door for others to compete against propreitary systems of the time, Compuserve and AOL (America Online). This also made our company one of the very first Internet Service Providers using the HTTP protocol, where a user would dial into our local BBS telephone lines and using this new software begin an experience of visualizing appealing text and images on their computer screens. It was not long before we had the need to increase our number of available lines, and by October of 1996 we were the first and only ISP to offer unlimited Internet Access for one low monthly fee.

As technology continued to expand, the need for hosts of new emerging content transformed my company, and we began offering web hosting, web design and even server co-location services where companies would house their equipment in our network operations center where we would take care of its setup, maintainence and operations. This was quite profitable. However we had major competition from the telephone companies who began to invade our market. Competing with new technologies such as Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and Digial Subscriber Line (DSL) services was extremely difficult as they were not required to allow other companies to deploy or resell these technologies which were only available by the providers who connected our potential customers on what we termed, "the last mile" of copper wire from the phone company to a subscriber's household. Eventually, this competition resulted in extreme losses of subscribers moving from a dial-up based technology where they called a specific number to connect with to a new dedicated direct connection to the telephone company. Devestated, I made the decision to sell off our remaining customer base and leave the industry, semi-retired.

In 2005, I moved 'off the grid' to the Appalachian mountain region of Western Maryland. When trying to get a new connection to the Internet for my personal use, a new job opportunity presented itself. The local ISP in the area had some of the same background I had with my own company, however its founder had unexpectedly passed away. His wife was left to run the company without his expertise, What was worse, was her brother in-law had taken over the security of all the systems, essentially blocking her out of the ability to control the technical end of the operations of her husband's legacy and livelihood of her and her children. For very little money, I agreed to help her and during one night went to work regaining control of every system. By morning, her brother-in-law was locked out and she was put back into control of what was rightfully hers.

I did my best to help her get the company on track, helping her evaluate her operations, staffing and technology expenses. I also worked with her to expand her wireless, dialup and DSL business. By now, the phone companies were forced to allow other companies to lease LAT circuits used to provide end to end connectivity over DSL and ISDN. Within a year however, my own financial situation and her unwillingness to pay me what was well deserved lead to my departure and return to Baltimore, where I would work with my real father to expand his online sales of do-it-yourself pest control products, a company I founded with him a few years earlier from profits of the now defunct ISP. However, in 2009, after the birth of my youngest son, my entire world changed. His mother had a seriously bad infection following the c-section birth and came very close to death. I had no choice but to leave the workforce while caring for her and my three sons.

As a satellite technology enthusiast for many years and an advocate for free television service for those living in rural areas unable to receive over-the-air VHF or UHF signals I developed a network of websites to train, educate and inform millions about technology which would enable free reception of satellite television. In March 2010 however, the United States Marshall Service raided my home with a civil warrant from Echostar Communications who were suing me for my involvement in what they termed 'signal theft', a premise by which a commercial company takes the stance that it owns a portion of the airwaves and signals radiating across the bodies of your children, and that if you successfully harness and convert that signal to viewable images and audio, it constitutes a "theoretical larceny". Unfortunately, the size and power of the company kept me from being able to fight such a legal battle, and the welfare of my children and their mother were my primary concern. I was sued and settled with Dish Network for 3.2 million dollars. I was now broke, losing everything, including all of my savings and all of my equipment. I had no choice but to return to the only place I might have a chance to afford to raise my family, and moved into a low cost farmhouse on 75 acres on Mount Davis in southwestern Pennsylvania where I currently reside.

Over the past few years I have been working hard on a number of projects which I am hoping will revolutionize the world wide web in the years to come. This hyper-local community service integrated with global media, is poised to bring back the hometown neighborhood feel of BBS computing prevalant in the early 1990s to the Internet of today, by helping to bring organization to the chaos which has blossomed from technologies suffering from the lack of collaboration among content creators, service providers and social networks.

Regrettably, with little funding, I have had no choice but to attempt to regain entry into the workforce. I am currently seeking employment that will help me provide for my family and bring my lifetime of experience to an organization who has a need for my talents. I would prefer not to relocate my family yet again, so I have made the decision to restrict myself to offers outside of a 50 mile radius of my home in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. If you are interested in what I have to offer your own company or Internet start-up, please send a message to me@robertkluver.com