Self Study

My first exposure to UNIX was when I was 12. My mother worked late-overtime, and would occasionally log me into a UNIX green-screen terminal to play an "interactive fiction", something about waking up on an abandoned spacecraft. I never did figure out how to do anything useful in the game - as the grammar was - at once - too simple and too complex for me to fully grasp. Not that I didn't try, and enjoy trying. I was not allowed to play with the command line, as this was my mom's work account, and she didn't want to get into trouble.

I didn't have access to any computer again until the summer before I started High School. A good friend of mine got an Amiga 500. I played for a long time with "Perfect Sound" and some Music sequencer (I was taking piano lessons at the time).

In High school, I was able to take a full year-computing elective. Half a year on business applications (DOS stuff, Word Perfect, Lotus 1,2,3), and half a year learning BASIC. I spent time on my friend's computer, playing with AmigaBASIC (with a really cool speach engine built-in). I was hooked. I was determined to learn everything that I could about these machines.

Criminal Computing

I spent the next year of High School without a computer class, or access to a computer. So, I would go into the computer lab very early in the morning, when nobody was in, and I would work on BASIC programs saved directly onto floppy (these were IBM computers that had no hard drives or operating systems, they booted default into a BASIC interpreter).

One day there was a note on the chair of the computer I used. It said, "if you use this equipment, leave everything exactly as you found it." The next day the note was still there (where I had carefully put it back the previous morning). This time, I was feeling smug, and leaving everything else in place, I discarded the note. The computer lab was never left unlocked again.