A Life at the Beginning of the Connected World

Peter and Tim grew up during the earliest days of personal computing. Long before the commercial Internet became part of everyday life, the brothers were experimenting with computers, modems, software and electronic communications.

As teenagers in Kirkwood, Missouri, Peter and Tim became active in the early bulletin-board system community. Public archives document their involvement with Whackoland BBS and the identity “TWCB,” or the W(hack)o Cracko Brothers. That early environment introduced them to distributed communications, online communities and the technologies that would later become the foundation of the Internet economy.

For Peter, that early fascination became a career in telecommunications, broadband and entrepreneurship.

Twin Brothers at the Beginning of the Internet

Peter and Timothy were not merely brothers born on the same day. They were partners in curiosity.

While most teenagers of their generation had never used a modem, Peter and Tim were learning how computers could communicate across telephone networks. They wrote software, operated bulletin-board systems and participated in some of the earliest online communities in the United States.

The technology was primitive by modern standards. Connections were measured in hundreds of bits per second rather than gigabits. Messages were exchanged through independently operated bulletin boards. There was no World Wide Web, no social media and no consumer broadband.

Yet the basic idea was already there: computers could connect people, information and businesses across great distances.

That idea would define both brothers' careers.

Timothy later became a technology founder, enterprise architect and investor. He served as a director and investor in Phoenix Networks while Peter helped lead the business. More about Timothy's career can be found at TimothyMunroRoberts.com.

Building a Career in Telecommunications

Through the 1990s, Peter built his career in the telecommunications industry. Family accounts associate his early professional years with WorldCom before he moved into entrepreneurial leadership; his exact title and dates there are being confirmed through family records.

By the late 1990s, as Internet access expanded rapidly across the United States, Peter was ready to build something of his own. He founded Phoenix Networks and helped grow it into a national broadband-services provider — the story told in the next chapter of this archive.