My Tech Backstory

The 'offline' days

My love for technology and computers started from a very young age; from me taking everything I ever had apart, to having little electronics kits, to getting our first PC. Being born in the early 90s meant I was lucky enough to not have always-on access to the internet, and I had to generally make my own fun, or learn via alternative means. Even before the age of 10, I had stacks upon stacks of PCW Magazine, which I always read cover to cover -- the other kids who had their heads in the latest Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl always thought I was a bit strange for reading non-fiction, but many sat in amazement during class as I set up the interactive whiteboards, provisioned laptops with the latest copy of Office, etc and functioned as the school's on-site technician - teachers allowing and requesting me out of lessons to get stuff set up for them...

Back at home, the little Pentium 3 family computer was loaded with random bits of freeware, shareware, and copies of software off those PCW discs; and the time it spent online (on Freeserve 'unlimited' Dialup) was usually with me downloading Winamp and Stardock's Object Desktop skins (much to the dismay of my parents, who were annoyed by the fact that the UI completely changed at least once-a-day). One thing I started to notice more and more in those PCW magazines was the mention of something called Linux -- an interesting alternative to Windows, and one that was feature packed and let you customize literally everything (and the GUIs looked like something out of a sci-fi film!)

Old Debian and LiveCDs

Needless to say, I wanted to learn more, and I started my journey when PCW had a copy of Debian on the coverdisc. At this point, we'd gotten a new laptop so the old PC was fair game for playing around with. Oh boy did I have have some fun getting that Debian install up and running; I was at it for DAYS. I still never got X11 running despite the instructions in the magazine (this was back in the day when X11 wasn't autoconfig!), but I had a lot of fun tinkering around the CLI, and figuring out where everything was. But I was hooked, so I ended out getting a copy of Linux Format magazine which came with something called Knoppix, which didn't require installation; so I tried that on the family laptop, and that was the real 'wow' moment for me; it started up from a CD faster than Windows XP booted from the hard disk, it came with loads of stuff, and KDE 3 was a pleasure to use!

So, a year passes by; every now and then I booted up the Knoppix disc and played around some more -- the wonderful thing about liveCDs is that if you break it, you just reboot and it's fixed again! But for now, I'd gone back to Windows on my new PC and that remained for another year or so... Until Windows XP SP2 came along and screwed everything up -- things worked a hell of a lot worse and I remember thinking "I want Linux again"...

Back when GNU/Linux came in a big box!

So, off I went to PC World and got a copy of Suse Linux 9.1 Professional. 5 CDs, 2 double sided DVDs (you had to flip 'em!), a huge Users Guide, and an even bigger Administrator's Guide. I still have that entire box set somewhere, and wow, I learned so much from it all. SuSE worked perfectly on my system, and a good number of years were spent running this system, trying different WMs, breaking and fixing X11, using NDISWrapper to load WiFi drivers for my little Belkin Wireless-G USB adapter, etc. God, those early days of Linux were certainly crusty, but I had a lot of fun, and it always felt super empowering to be able to go in and fix things, unlike with Windows.

YaST made the setup truly easy, compared with the Debian install I fought with a couple of years before. I still remember the little SaX2 config window that popped up and configured X11 for me. Things we take for granted now weren't all that easy to get going back on Linux 2.6! Granted, I went through more and more distros over the years past then, from Ubuntu, Fedora Core 4 (which I broke within 2 days because I tried getting Wobbly Windows working. I'm not kidding, the bootscreen used X11! so if you broke AIGLX or your GPU drivers, then you broke the bootscreen, and silly me didn't know how to make it boot without it!). Needless to say, I avoided Fedora for around 14 versions or so after that.

What a wild ride

And here I am, writing this little page on a Dell XPS 13 running Manjaro -- my XFCE setup roughly emulates that of the early Gnome days, complete with the Bluecurve theme that reminds me of those Red Hat screenshots I used to see in PCW all those years ago. Gives me the warm and fuzzies!

I don't think there were many 11-year-old's that were doing what I was doing, but I was having a hell of a lot of fun, and it was from that point on that I realised that I wanted to 'do computers' as a job when I grow up. And here I am, maintaining and developing for, GNU/Linux based systems all around the world. I'm truly grateful for that crazy upbringing, and for my parents allowing me to break the family computer at least once a week in the name of self-education! It's a shame PCW Magazine isn't around any more; unfortunately the internet has killed a lot of publications off now. Kids these days will never know the joys of unwrapping the latest monthly magazine that'll keep you busy for a week, and having a coverdisk of shareware (and an AOL 180 Minutes CD) drop out of it.