Why this page, you may ask. Well, of course I wanted my very own place on the Internet, and I wanted it to be in a gay-friendly environment. My first choice fell on Angelfire, where my first home page still is situated. The "about frank"-page here is meant to replace its function. Soon after, however, I discovered GeoCities, and the West Hollywood neighbourhood. And 1 MB of disk space! My ISP at that time, Telia - the Swedish state phone company - didn't offer any space for a home page. (Now I have access to something like 80 MB of Internet space, and two ISP's: Utfors and Algonet. And, as you may know, nowadays GeoCities offers 15 MB free space.)

I first ventured out on the Internet in the summer of 1996. I had tried it once in 1995 in a convention centre but didn't really understand what it was all about. Browsing through the Teletext pages of Swedish TV3 (3text), I found out they had an Internet service for anyone with a telephone, so I had to check it out. And got hooked pretty soon. Believe it or not, I only had a cellular phone at the time, so the phone bills got very high. But it was worth every öre. Click on this button to find out more about the old 3text on-line:

I made some good friends via e-mail and the RFSL-chat which helped me a lot with my own feelings and finding out who I really am. 3text had, of course, only a text browser (special version of Lynx) but I was hungry for more and found out that I could surf at the Liseberg amusement park and at the Internet Café @ttityd here in Gothenburg. In September '96 the city library got connected with 12 terminals, and suddenly I could surf for free!

Having seen all the colourful and creative pages on the net, naturally I wanted to get one myself. And so I did - from the public library! With no prior knowledge of html encoding, but with the help of my friend Henry in Stockholm and by copying from other pages.

But was I satisfied? No, I had to get Internet at home, and when I got an offer I "couldn't refuse", I bought my IBM Aptiva 354 with a Pentium 120 Mhz processor, 12 Mb RAM (now 72), 8x CD-ROM, and an HP Deskjet 600 printer. (Remember, this was in September 1996.) I guess that makes me a Micro$lave. ;-)

Ah yes, and why the name Eastgarden? Well, that's how my last name translates into English, and I do like to see things grow in front of me. ;-)