Zarf has been on the 'net since before at-signs in e-mail addresses. (Yes, '!decvax' is meaningful to him!)
His first major homesteading project was on the MIT hosted community 'Cyberion City II'. There he opened a lively coffee house with full menu, a stage, outdoor seating, and weekly poetry events. He liked the humor, the community, and (perhaps most of all) the programming.
Then the web happened. And suddenly, while the whole net became a community that anyone could publish in, it lost both interactivity, communal creation, and (perhaps most of all (did I say that already?)) programming.
Since then, Zarf has been on a quest to either find or build tools for the net.