“What really got me into the Internet,” B.J. says, still hanging out in the study, “was game cheats. Originally I wanted to do a game cheat Web site.”(A “game cheat” lets you manipulate video games to your advantage.) But even as a child, Beege used the powers of the Web for good. He desperately wanted a dog, he explains, but his parents weren’t convinced. “So I e-mailed people with dachshund Web sites and asked them to e-mail me back about why they were good dogs.” Today, a black dachshund named Tia roams the two floors of the Pinchbeck house with blissful impunity.

In 2001, after laboring on the site for years, something unexpected happened: The Discovery Channel made an offer to partner with B.J. for “Homework Helper.” It was perfect timing for Beege and Bruce, because the dot-com explosion was quickly grinding to a halt. The site can still be found online, at discoveryschool.com, complete with an adorably outdated photo of B.J., as if to suggest that a 13-year-old still handles its day-to-day operations single-handedly.

But by now, Beege has moved on from “Homework Helper.” “It got a little old towards the end,” he admits, although he still teaches an annual junior webmaster course at Penn State’s Beaver Campus with his father, as he’s done for the past three summers. In a year Beege will be a college student himself, possibly at Rochester Institute of Technology or Carnegie Mellon, where he plans to spend time learning more about one of his newest obsessions: digital filmmaking. “I just want to move to Florida and start a video production company!” he says excitedly, following the film screening in the study.
“ I’ve always said to both my daughter and to B.J.,” the elder Pinchbeck offers, “that I want you to do something you have a passion for. Even if they’re interested in bricklaying! If that’s their passion, they can be very successful. I’m sure all this attention has affected him in some way,” he continues. “It certainly has broadened his experiences. He probably relates to people better as a result of all this. But then there’s the other side to B.J.: He’s very low-key. You know. B.J.’s B.J.”

Flash back to the summer of 1994.
It’s hot outside—finally!—and that means Jon Rosenson’s senior class is winding down its four years at Mount Leba-non High School. And then on the last day of school, his math teacher says something like this: “When you kids get to college, first thing you do, you’ve gotta check out this thing called the Internet. Seriously, people!”

“ So of course I took his word for it,” recalls Rosenson, who, in 2004, is an executive with the tech company Expedient, sitting in a Green Tree office decorated with a “Speed Racer” bobble-head doll, a gumball machine and a framed poster that reads: “Innovation: If there is a better solution…find it.”

A decade ago, thousands of people were discovering the phenomenon of the Internet for the first time. Like most of them, Jon was duly impressed. “Thinking back,” he says, of his first foray online, “I was very into Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Phish. So what I did is I kind of searched out the music I was looking for. And what you could do on the Internet,” he continues, “was join an e-mail list to talk to other people who were fans and trade cassette tapes through the mail. It was very efficient for the time!”

One of young Jon’s first virtual pen pals was another local guy—Mike Ruscitto—who lived in Peters Township, and was only 15 years old, although Jon wasn’t aware of that then. Ruscitto was something of an Internet pioneer himself and had talked his father into getting him an ultra-fast T1 line for his computer. (Dial-ups were even slower 10 years ago than they are now.) So even though they’d never met, it wasn’t a huge surprise, maybe, when Ruscitto asked Jon, who already had his own home page, if he wanted to take the tape-trading a step further. Both boys were fans of Rusted Root, then just a local jam band, and Ruscitto figured the band deserved a Web site. If Jon would build it, Ruscitto would host it on his very own server. It’d be cool—just as if they were in business!

“I got a copy of—I think it was Photoshop,” Rosenson says, looking up at the ceiling and straining to remember. “I scanned in some album covers, and I typed in some lyrics, and we had this Web site for Rusted Root. It wasn’t anything extravagant, but it was the only one available.” A few weeks later, Jon got a phone call from another Ruscitto brother, Marc. “Hey,” Marc said. “I know you’ve been working with my brother on this Web site thing. We’re thinking about starting a company. We’d like to see if you’d be interested in joining up with us.”
So Jon’s dad drove him to Al’s Café in Peters Township, right on McMurray Road, to meet with Marc, who was 25. Jon had the hamburger. “And it’s at that point that I find out that Mike is only 15 or 16,” he recalls, stifling a laugh. “Marc really just wanted to check me out, to make sure I wasn’t some guy trying to scam his
little brother.”

The three hit it off, though, and the Ruscittos invited Jon to come over and check out their operation. According to Jon’s mother, Fern, he started working at the Ruscitto house day and night. So with her husband in tow, she decided to investigate. “We drove up this winding driveway—there was a horse stable at the top of it—and we finally got around to the living area. We knocked on the door, and here were these two kids—Mike Ruscitto and Jon—and they were in this bedroom with purple shag carpeting and about $50,000 or $75,000 worth of equipment. It was a little odd.”

It was also the scene that represented the birth of the home-spun tech company that would soon become Stargate Industries: a couple of smart kids expertly fiddling with expensive machines in a bedroom while the grown-ups stood by and scratched their heads, wondering.

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