For the first Throwback Thursday, I thought I'd start at the beginning: how I got into technology at all.
A mechanic's kid with a Packard Bell
In high school I was mostly into cars and sports. My dad was a mechanic, so being a grease monkey was in my blood, and I played football, baseball and track.
Around my sophomore year we got our first computer. While my mom was out of town visiting family, Dad went to Best Buy and came home with a shiny new Packard Bell and every accessory they'd sell him. Mom was not impressed with his initiative. I was hooked.
It was a Pentium 90 running Windows 3.11, with a free upgrade to Windows 95! I don't remember much else about the specs, but it felt like a rocket ship. It came with an encyclopedia on CD, so I could look things up without opening a book, which at that point in high school I very much did not want to do. We still had a full set of printed encyclopedias on the shelf in the "computer room."
Remember when the computer had its own room? Things were simpler when the internet had to stay in there with it. But I digress.
Making the business case for AOL
My uncle had a computer too, and he had the internet. On a visit we got to try it: dial-up, AOL, the whole thing. Being connected to someone across the country felt incredible.
I immediately started making the business case to my parents for why the internet was necessary. It would give me access to all this information. It would help with my homework. They gave in, and we became an AOL household.
I barely knew how to use the computer, and now I had the internet. Watch out. In hindsight, unrestricted internet access for a teenager probably wasn't the best idea.
The internet lies
I quickly figured out that you could download things. I was a teenager and had no idea there were bad things out there, so I assumed that whatever a file said it was, that's what it was. That's how I learned that the internet lies, and that there's such a thing as a virus.
I completely trashed our first computer. Luckily my parents didn't know much about computers either, so we all assumed it was just broken. Dad knew a guy who bought our "broken" computer, and he went out and bought a new tower. Mom remained impressed with our purchasing decisions.
You'd think I'd have learned. I was a little more aware that viruses existed and could wreck a computer, but that didn't stop me from infecting the new family computer too. This time, though, I had a vague idea of how to fix it, and I worked out how to clean it up myself. I don't remember exactly what I did. What mattered was that my parents didn't find out until years later, because there was zero chance I'd survive telling them I'd ruined a second computer.
Looking back, that was my first incident response: contain it, clean it up, and keep it off the front page.
The dial-up trick
By then I was getting pretty handy with the computer, and I'd picked up a few tricks I shared with friends. The one I remember best was the dial-up password skip.
Dial-up services only had so many lines, and at peak times getting connected was painful, especially with a parent-enforced computer curfew. Every minute spent redialing was a minute not spent online.
AOL didn't hang up on you for a wrong password. It tried to sign you in, then told you the password was wrong. So if you left the password blank, or typed a single character, the dialer would cycle and retry without you retyping a real password each time. When it finally got a line, it reported "incorrect password," you typed the real one, and you were in. I was a terrible typist, so on a night with ten retries, that could save a few minutes.
I shared it with all my friends, and to them it was like I'd invented a time machine.
Not an architect after all
As high school went on, everyone asked what I was going to study in college, because for my generation college was expected. I'd always pictured myself as an architect or an engineer. I liked building and making things.
The problem with architecture: I couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler, and blueprints were still drawn by hand. That plan was out.
Senior year, still undecided, a buddy said, "Hey, you're pretty good with computers. Why don't you study that?" From then on, I was going to study computers. I was accepted to a state school with an engineering college.
College, and the dorm-room server
College confirmed one thing quickly: I didn't want to be a programmer. My early computer science classes didn't click. But a few guys on my dorm floor were deep into technology, including one who had done IT support for his high school, and they taught me a lot.
Eventually I built my own computer from parts ordered online. Early e-commerce was wild. Boxes kept arriving at my dorm room until I had everything: an AMD K6-2 450, a 28 GB hard drive, a Sound Blaster and a 3dfx Voodoo card. I thought I was on top of the world. Someone gave me a copy of Windows 98 SE on a burned CD with the product key written on it in marker. At the time I didn't think twice about where it came from, which is not something I'd recommend now.
Putting it together, I loved the excitement of a new build, and I fell further down the technology hole from there. My roommate wasn't thrilled, though he did enjoy what came with it: a 27-inch Sony Trinitron and a cobbled-together DVD player running off the computer's video output, well before a standalone DVD player was anything close to affordable on a college budget.
The school held surplus sales, so I picked up a couple of old 486s for next to nothing and tried to make them do everything I could think of. It was exciting, and it was cheap.
Around then, a lot of my friends got into what could loosely be called web design. Mostly we set up GeoCities pages to trash-talk each other. It was fun, but I didn't want to live with GeoCities' restrictions, ads and general awfulness. I wanted to know how the web actually worked: hosting, servers, what made a site load.
I was also due for an upgrade, so I built a new desktop and kept the old one as a "server." I installed Windows 2000 Server on it, bought Mark Minasi's Mastering Windows 2000 Server, and decided I was going to figure it out. So I did: I read, tried, failed, tried and failed some more, read again, and eventually got it working.
That's how it started
That's how I got into tech, in a nutshell. There's a lot more to it, but some of those details definitely can't be shared in public, even anonymously.
The pattern held for the rest of my career: break something, figure out how to fix it before anyone notices, then read the manual. These days I do it in the opposite order.
I hope you enjoyed the first Throwback Thursday. I'll try to share a story like this every week, or at least once a month: classic tales from my years in IT.