Steve Kraft

Steve was born in Elmhurst, Illinois and lived in Villa Park for five years. His family — Ray and Judy Kraft and brother Mark Kraft — moved to Lombard, Illinois. In 1974 another brother, Brian, joined the family. Steve grew up in Lombard and graduated from Glenbard East High School.

He lived there until age 21. On October 10, 1987 he married Theresa Davis. They moved to Addison, Illinois into a small one-bedroom apartment, stayed there for a year, and later moved to Downers Grove. After a short separation they got back together in 1994 and moved to Steve's current home in Aurora. Steve and Tracy divorced in November 2009. Steve has been with his partner, Ginger, since 2012.

Steve has been interested in computers, electronics, networking, and technology for most of his life. Long before the modern Internet, he ran Gangland BBS from Aurora, Illinois, connecting computers over telephone lines and learning the foundations of networking and online communication. In 1997, that interest evolved into SteveKraft.com, a personal website that has continued to grow and change for nearly three decades.

Today, SteveKraft.com is still hosted from Steve's own home equipment rather than a commercial web-hosting company. His home server environment includes Thor, a Windows Server system running IIS and supporting the website, file services, media services, Internet radio, network tools, and other projects. More recently, Steve has expanded the system into local artificial intelligence, running AI models privately on his own hardware and integrating a local AI assistant directly into SteveKraft.com.

Steve also operates Dirt EDM Internet Radio and maintains two Vaughn Live channels: Nuse, his long-running video channel, and Dirt EDM.

Away from the computers, Steve enjoys spending time with Ginger, his partner since 2012, their dog King, who has been part of their lives since early 2022, and family and friends. King is also Steve's regular walking companion. Steve is a lifelong automotive and motorsports enthusiast who enjoys building and racing cars, working on off-road vehicles, camping, and riding side-by-sides with family and friends. Trips to places such as Windrock Park in Tennessee and the Badlands in Indiana are part of that lifestyle.

Steve competed at Sycamore Speedway from 2019 through 2023, culminating in the 2023 Compact Championship. In 2024, he switched to racing at Kankakee County Speedway. In 2026, Steve finally earned his first race win, taking a heat race victory before undergoing quadruple bypass surgery on July 23, 2026. His 2026 racing season ended there, but he plans to return to competition at Kankakee in 2027.

Whether it involves spending time with Ginger and King, family and friends, a race car, a side-by-side, a server, Internet radio, or the latest AI technology, Steve is usually working on something, improving something, or figuring out how to make it work better.

His computer history goes all the way back to the Atari 400/800 series