Welcome to the Joe page!

I'm Joe Rinehart from Ravenna, Ohio. Carl Knorr who first thought of the name and I co-founded the company config.sys International, Inc.

This photo of me was taken by "The MusicMan" of the Buckeye Computer Club in Canton, Ohio while I was discussing "Information Technology" in 1993. I've since cut my hair to Marine corps standards.

In 1999, I helped develope a company called Config.Com, Inc.. These days I keep very busy managing and consulting on information technology and electronic publishing projects. Although, I am the President of Config.Com, Inc. for legal reasons I really prefer to use the title Operations Designer since several others enjoy helping within our corporate environment.

If you are interested in more personal information about me you will find it on my bio page.

You may also be interested in the collection of CD-ROM reviews that I started before the web. With the help from Zbigniew Tyrlik of Apk.Net we created the alt.cd-rom.reviews newsgroup then with Ian Vershuren of Apk.Net a homepage for the project in the early days of web development which was the first web page in Ohio. It was this era that I authored the first URL ever advertised in a computer magazine (Computer Shopper Oct 1993 - Oct 1994).

Over the years the entire staff of Apk.Net has made contributions toward the success of the alt.cd-rom.review project! The project has received as many as 731,000 total page requests weekly. The project went off-line excepting FTP access in Oct 1996 due to the high traffic and that we no longer sold CD-ROM titles to fund it or had sponsorship. I might point out that several larger companies started their own review programs rather than offer sponsorship funding for ours which was discouraging. Although I no longer collect CD-ROM reviews, I still monitor the alt.cd-rom.reviews newsgroup.

FTP the orginial alt.cd-rom.reviews collection from the config.com/cdroms site. Keep in mind that this is now outdated information.

I had a lot of fun working with Dr. Brandon Perez in 1995 consulting for Child Search which lead to the placing their worthy charitable organization on the web. Dr. Perez, has since found T-3 hosting sponsorship, learned HTML and has been editing the web site with the same enthusium in which he founded the organization. These days, not much is left of the orginial site except the scanned images;^)

The Akron, Ohio Area Internet Directory was the first of several community Internet directories which I created and now receive a lot of help from those listed on the project credits page. The Akron community directory project has been recognized by Compton's on-line encylopedia, a book "It's raining cat's and sea dog's" (about minor league baseball), and in several newspaper articles.

Our Kent, Ohio Area Community directory has since become our model community directory due to access of information as a result of a high degree of support from: The Kent, Ohio Area Chamber of Commerce, the City of Kent, Ohio, Kent State University, the local school system, and of course, the citizens.

Our company maintains a single guestbook of all combined projects which is always pleasant reading. Please consider contributing your public comments as well.

On June 4th 1996 config.sys Productions, Ltd. started providing Internet services in Portage County, Ohio through an alliance with Apk.Net. We used the Internet services resellor opportunity to further develope our cybercafe (public access) market research project and became the 1st "Public Access" high speed T-1 site in Ohio. On December 24th, 1998, we expanded our well known commercial services to include consumer dial-in services and are no longer associated with APK.net!

On July 1st 1997, one of the former principles left the company to develope his own Internet services alliance in Portage county so we restructured the company to become Config.Com, Inc. and Config.Sys Productions, LTD. was disolved legally. Ironically, the new competition (Nacs.Net) buys their bandwidth connection from Apk.Net ;^) We choose NOT to purchase our bandwidth from another ISP, but rather, wholesale direct to the Internet OC-3 backbone via full T-1. This fact in addition to the state of the art network hardware listed on our consumer dial-in access server http://home.config.com/ allow us to offer the highest quality of access possible for our Portage County, Ohio communities.

Since around July of 1997, I've been keeping busy developing the config.sys commercial internet clients and helping whomever I can get connected. Prior to July of '97 we focused on publishing community content for Northeast Ohio.

I enjoy editing community Internet directories, educational pages, The GlobalPeace.Net Project and several other publishing projects in my spare ;^) time. Several of these projects are being edited for a potential forthcoming CD-ROM pressing designed to promote the communities in Northeast Ohio.

I also serve as a Internet consultant and/or project manager for these clients and the domains hosted on our servers, and also several domains which are hosted on other servers.

During the year 1996 in my career I was given the opportunity to electronically market some rare artifacts to raise funding for our community publishing projects and to share some history in the process. If you click your mouse on the rare photograph of President Abraham Lincoln you will be able to view our @config.com antiques directory. One of the antiques is an ancient Chinese ivory paperweight which is available for any reasonable offer in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. USD.

In the week of July 4th, 1998, I received the opportunity for our company to publish the web site for The National Association of the Physically Handicapped. To have the opportunity to share our knowledge of electronic communications in such a manner that will bring awareness to the plight of the physically disadvantaged is truly one of the highlights of my career.

These days I'm riding the third cyberwave of the information age and loving every millisecond second! Join me at the beach;^)