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About Us
I'm Pat Toner, the owner of Toner Design, which was officially registered as
a business in 1998 but was actually in place about a year before that. Yes, Toner
Design is a woman-owned business!
It all started when I was asked to do some
freelance work for another business on the side...and it grew from there. Like
many businesses, it was begun in a home office at night after working another
job all day, returning home at night to work as long as I could stay awake. I
still work from a home office, but things have changed a lot from those early
beginnings.
As with many who began 10 or more years ago in the computer industry, most of
my knowledge has been self-taught from books, online tutorials and databases,
or gleaned from associates who were kind enough to share their knowledge with
me.
I first began my love affair with computers back in 1989, when my first home
computer came into the house. It was a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive--that was
more than enough space back then to house a lot of information--which ran on
DOS. When it first came in the door I didn't even know how to turn it on, let
alone do anything with it. It just goes to prove that it doesn't matter where
you start learning, just as long as you get started and keep on learning every
day.
I first got online about a year later, starting on Prodigy, moving on to GEnie,
and finally opening an account on AOL. (Do the math--I've been online over 15
years now, longer than most people have owned a computer or even their current
car!) Those early days were the days of the hourly rates to get online (rather
than the unlimited access people are used to today) and "per email" charges.
It could cost a bundle if you weren't careful. But these early online services
opened up a world, and at the time AOL was miles ahead of its competition with
the graphical interface it presented that we now take for granted on the Web
today. That early online experience and being present when the Web first began
its exponential growth gives me a unique perspective that few of the companies
doing web design today have.
A few years later, with the patient tutelage of some friends, I built my first
computer and within 3 months built and ran a small BBS (Bulletin Board Service).
You can find it listed on BBSMates.com
as Parapet BBS, For those of you who don't
remember BBSs, they were micro-versions of the big online services, although
without all the wonderful graphics and technology that so many of us now take
for granted. They usually ran in DOS, we created our images using ASCII characters
(basically letters and numbers and the other symbols on the keyboard), and completed
with each other to have the best-looking BBS. These BBSs were hooked together
through the phone lines, bulletin board messages downloaded each night from other
BBSs, and mostly we played games on them or downloaded shareware. They were a
great place to meet other computerphiles, and provided a marvelous computer education
in many ways. It took programming skills and lots of devotion to run one, but
those of us who got involved with running BBSs loved it.
The time came when Windows 3.1 came out, followed by the very first version of
Microsoft Office--we played with it in the beta copy, and began to see what wonderful
things the future had in store in computers.
The Internet really started coming into its own around 1995—all of us who
ran BBSs noticed a big drop in traffic, and within a year the BBSs were pretty
much dead. But we'd learned a lot about being online and what users liked and
did while online, and that knowledge carries through into the sites I develop
today.
Obviously I've come a long way since those days, as has the computer industry.
The Internet has achieved in just a few short years what it took TV triple the
number of years to achieve, and took radio over 30 years to achieve—get into
the majority of Americans' homes. And it will only continue to grow, as long
as we work to keep it open to all.
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© Copyright 1997-
, Toner Design. All rights reserved.
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