I always liked reading computer magazines and still do. In the late 1980’s I heard of this thing called the internet, was intrigued by it and went out and bought a 9600 baud modem. A friend had given me a computer, Windows based in the days before VGA was even a standard (my first was an Apple IIc). I learned DOS and got to work. The modem was lightening fast in those days and there was only one Internet provider at the time, a national service called Delphi. AOL, Compuserve, all the others were yet to be invented.
There were a handful of Orthodox contributors on the internet usually on obscure “bulletin boards” (remember those?). After about three years it would take off as more people heard of this thing called the internet. (I remember having an email conversation with someone in England. This was years before real time chat was invented. I would write him. In a minute I would receive an email response from him. I knew how far England was from Duluth, Minnesota and I remember my parents paying $50 for a 15 minute telephone call to Holland. That’s when I first grasped that this internet thing was going to be big.)
As more people signed on, I met a guy online named Harry Coin. You know him from his contributions here. Harry and I got to talking and along with a third contributor decided to start an Orthodox discussion forum. We called it “Orthodox-Forum” and it still exists today. The only other list at the time was the Indiana List and since those were the days of the ROCOR – OCA wars, I had no interest in it at all. Neither did Harry, neither did Fr. Steven, the third contributor. “Orthodox Forum” took off and it still exists today.
One of the subscribers was a man named Robert Hoskens. He wasn’t Orthodox, he worked in Russia with handicapped children, but he knew more than a lot of the Evangelicals who were flooding Russia at the time trying to convert them to American Evangelicalism. (Not meant sarcastically; the Russians perceived Evangelicalism as an “American” religion.) We spent a considerable amount of time in coherent apologetic discussion. After a while it was time to move on. I resigned from Orthodox Forum and started Orthodoxy Today (after 9-11). I lost track of Robert.
About four years ago I got an email from Robert Hoskens. It turned out he had become an Orthodox Christian. It surprised me. I was very glad to hear it of course, but it was something I never expected simply because he was such a serious Christian. I looked at him in the same way as I might look at someone like, say, Richard Wurmband, a Lutheran whose witness is, well, thoroughly Orthodox. You can view Robert Hosken’s website here.
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