What can I say about myself that won't make me sound egotistical?  I know, basic biographical data, can't go wrong there.

AGE: 41

EDUCATION: Limited College, mostly school of hard knocks.

MARITAL STATUS: Married.

HOBBIES: Computer gaming (flight simulators, MMORPGS, etc.), reading, motorcycling  (though I need to get it running), and some light bicycling.

Now that the preliminaries are taken care of, now to the meat of the biography of  Mad Harry, known as a Mad Hatter, and also know as the mysterious WorlockX.

The online persona of Mad Harry goes back to the summer of 1990, when I retired the use of the pretentious handle of Lord Dragonslayer the Black.  Back in those days, one needed a handle, a nom de plume for most BBS´s of the time.  As a veteran of a rather nasty flame war, I felt that Dragonslayer was too high profile and needed to be retired as it drew a lot of baiting attacks.  As I began thinking of the new handle, it occured to me.  I could be online who I´d always been, with a slight twist.  You see, as long as I can conciously remember, my mother has called me Harry.  Though, I was the one who later latched on the Harry spelling, minutes after my birth, Mom said that I was a hairy baby, hence the Hairy.  I was probably very young, maybe 3 or 4, when I started signing notes and cards for Mom with Harry.  Though my given name is David, Mom never  called me David, unless I was in trouble, and then it was David John, which meant I was really in trouble.  So, I decided that since I needed a new handle and until this point Harry was just my special nickname that only Mom could use, I decided to change that.  In a way, I´ve always been Harry.  So, what about this twist?  Well, nobody knows what to really expect from a mad man, and so, Mad Harry who was later the proprietor of the Mad Hatter Institute (a BBS I ran for a few years), was born. 

So, now that Mad Harry has been explained let me briefly explain about MHI.  MHI began taking shape in my head in the fall of 1990.  I had already debuted Mad Harry, on the first incarnation of The Phil Thach Connection, the BBS known to most of us locally as PTC, in 1990 Phil ran the board on a Commodore 128.  Anyway, I helped to set up the Wal-Mart I worked in at the time, during set up and then while working in the Electronics section, I began bouncing ideas around my head.  I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin at the time and so I had Zeppelins, Psychodelic Mushrooms, and trippy imagery swirling in my head.  So, there was the Psychodelic Zeppelin Company.  In that mishmash, there were other odd influences, mainly Monty Python´s Flying Circus and their movies.  And now for something completely different.  As Mad Harry, I didn´t think the Psychodelic thing was going to work and so, I thought back on the BBS prototyping I´d done on and off for a couple of years.  Something stuck out, the abyssmal game Neuromancer and it´s inspiration of the prototypical Night City, well I had handed off the name to another wannabe sysop who folded shortly after bringing the board up for a short period of time.  But the general idea lent itself to what became The Mad Hatter Institute for Advanced Telecommunications.  But for the most part, it was just MHI.  It was MHI through a few moves, starting in Lakesite, moving to East Ridge, moving to Red Bank, moving back to Lakesite, then to St Elmo for a few weeks, back to Lakesite, to Red Bank again, and then to St Elmo where it operated until 1998, though that last year of operation was essentially as the mail hub while I served as Network Echomail Coordinator for Net 362.