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At four or four or five years old, my idea of great toys were batteries, light bulbs, and wires. My grandmother, Marcella Ellsworth, who taught me how to read and do math by the time I was 3 years old, encouraged this. That grew into my development as an avid electronics hobbyist.

Growing up, I never knew another Charles Oropallo. In fact, Oropallo was a rather rare name in telephone books at the time.

I got his first computer in 1977. In November of that year, I authored and implemented a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called Access-80. It operated on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, Level II microcomputer. There were only a handful of such systems online for public use on the entire planet at that time. It provided personal messaging for local computer enthusiasts.

Access-80 initially went online in East Greenbush, NY with a 300 baud modem and home brewed auto answering device ultimately being upgraded to 1200 baud. Relative speed and technological changes have been immense – today’s dial-up (if you are unfortunate enough to have to use dial-up!) at its fastest speed is 53,000 bits per second compared to 300 at Access-80’s start! Around that time, Access-80 was also concurrently placed online in Schenectady, NY. In 1982, I moved from the Albany, NY area to Nashua, NH, and so did Access-80. my original Nashua Access-80 setup is shown at http://Access80.com. Before long Access-80 was concurrently online in Londonderry NH as well as Nashua. Access-80 remained online until 1987.

I founded CharlesWorks in June of 1998 in order to provide reliable and affordable hosting and web development solutions. At that time I was only providing Internet connectivity for several personal and organizational websites at very low speed. These days we provide domain names through http://CharlesWorks.domains and operate our own website hosting infrastructure onsite over a private optical connection with gigabit capability into the internet backbone.

We do nearly all of our work as a result of referrals. As my services and work ethic became more in demand, I hired people to expand CharlesWorks over the years. We’ve handled many thousands of websites and love doing this.

Ironically, there are many people named Charles Oropallo now. In fact, Oropallo is a rather common name throughout the world. Being a Charles Oropallo can be confusing at times because there are so many.

Many people helped me over the years. I love the idea of paying that forward and helping others every way possible.