About Graham Brookins

A look at my own history

I started in my early years working as A/B * The solution name * without a license in my early tweens. Often I worked as A/B Lawn Care or A/B Snow Removal Service.

I earned enough to keep my interest in growing further in business and in my tweens by registering a company in Alaska called "Encom" aka tagline "Enigma Communications" a technology company.

I also in the winter around this time remember A/B earning enough to buy a Nintendo NES Console + Mario Game + Duck Hunt Game from Costco for less than $100 by shoveling show out of driveways in my home neighborhood.

I never looked back.

I kept learning and studying technology and business.

I replaced the computing power of NES with an Apple Machintosh (Classic) Clone (A Power Tower by Power Computing) and dreams of writing simple applications that represented higher quality works than expected, surpassing expectations.

My Power Computing - Power Tower (Mid Height Case Tower) came with an optional secondary or alternate OS Demo / Installer CD for Be, Inc's BeOS (now replaced largely by the growing Haiku OS a non-copyleft free software license based replacement for modern use in 2025 and beyond 2000 (british tech tv show in the past).

I was very interested in alternative bootable OS combinations of freely available software on cheep hardware for task based computing solutions to be stanardized with.

Ever use Claris e-mailer from Claris (Before Apple Re-Absorbed them) a Macintosh software vendor in the 1990?

It could create new filter rules and then re-process unfiltered emails within content tree of inboxes by name. It was lightyears a head of its time and gui design was very very user friendly. It was a killer app in a class of it's own.

I wanted as a teen to create a BeOS GUI App called "BeMailer". Sadly without help at the time these dreams were sadly put aside as I could not understand fast enough without guidance and proven solutions to my basic needs without a lot of hand holding. In short I struggled to use "CodeWarior" on Machintosh and ambition to code a c++ app demo. I never finished and only recently with the drastic rise in popularity and a usable daily driver os possible with HaikuOS see "BeMailer" inspired features as more within my reach, Perhaps my ideas could be made into a more consumer friendly thunderbird mail extension as a proof of concept, i'm still dreaming of a world with more secure and feature rich mail based solutions to help users scale to deal with larger volumes of incomming email and long term record management.

I worked first officially as a Carrs Bag Boy at 14 at Carrs - Quality Centers an Alaskan based Grocery Store Chain that was quite successful throughout their history and after their purchase by Safeway.

I loved working. but disliked not working with technology or even for my own business interest.

I kept working harder and in time moved on to interning at local broadcasting firms as production talent (board operator positions; entry level) in radio and then tv.

I learned as much as possible in every possible broadcasting position that existed at the time.

I was a trusted team member of the company.

I still dreamed of greater technology to learn and left broadcasting for this new thing called the internet.

I worked at IAI aka Internet Alaska as a Technical Support Representative and was recognized and quickly promoted to The Over Night Network Monitor and Technical Support.

I left IAI and moved on to Programming Dynamic Web based Applications (Dynamic Websites) for a small company called 7x Group, LLC. This was my first real paid programming position.

I had been paid to create HTML and JavaScript before at IAI. But this was dynamic! Powered. by Allaire ColdFusion! Hosted on Linux! You could litterally with simple techneques and scaffolding called FuseBox use CFML to build / program anything you needed and a lot more. The problem quickly became quickly implementing every needed feature within a re-usable package of small tools. I continued to dream of generating with ai a replacement that could be GNU / Linux based in all possible aspects.

(Hint: I found it later that year and couldn't remember the strange non usa domain name where i found it. I had stumbled upon ezpublish and the ez.no website back in 1.0 days)

I left 7x Group, LLC to found my technology incubator kracker.org from my home office and also started brookins consulting to act as a central focus for my main business ventures.

I worked as Brookins Consulting from 2001 - 2018 when I re-launched an idea i had when ez.no removed ezpublish from the internet 2013; Rebrand Brookins Consulting to 7x and fork ezpublish product and create a distribution to fix the bugs and help other users with a similar need for this advanced cms super solution tool.

In 2022 i was working on refining php7 support for ezpublish+manual patches with bugfixes locally.

In 2023, I was working publicly on adding php8 support for all major ezpublish forks and starting ezpublish 6.0 project (later renamed exponential 6)

In 2025 I lead an ecosystem of developers who value freedom and price of our free software Family of PHP CMSs.