Beginnings
The Machine That Started It All
My first computer was a Tandy 1000SX β or something close to it β powered by an Intel 8088 processor. It sat on a desk in our house in Atlantic City, humming away with that distinctive CRT glow, and it was the most fascinating object I had ever encountered.
That machine gave me my first glimpse into the rabbit hole that is computing. It was powerful enough to run MS-DOS 3.2, which at the time felt like having the keys to a kingdom. Every directory listing, every blinking cursor waiting for input β it all felt like a conversation with something alive.
And even more importantly, that Tandy could run Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero. This was the game that taught me you could build entire worlds inside a computer. You could be a hero, solve puzzles, fight monsters β all rendered in glorious EGA graphics.
Those 16 colors were magic. Sierra On-Line's artists could paint entire mountain ranges and enchanted forests with a palette most people today wouldn't accept for a loading screen. I didn't care. I was in the game.
Learning to Speak the Language
With my trusty DOS for Dummies book in hand, I set out to learn everything I could about how the operating system worked. I memorized commands, explored directory structures, edited CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files until the machine did exactly what I wanted. I was beginning to understand the inner workings of the machine, and that understanding felt like a superpower.
The Library
I spent a lot of time at the Atlantic City Free Public Library. It was my second home. I would check out books on all sorts of subjects β programming, electronics, science fiction, anything that caught my eye. They even had movies on VHS that you could borrow. I'm pretty sure I watched Real Genius (1985) this way, though it may have just been on PRISM. Either way, Val Kilmer's portrayal of a genius hacker-scientist who didn't take himself too seriously left a lasting impression.
The most important thing I ever found at that library was a book: The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1989) by Cliff Stoll. It's the true story of an astronomer-turned-sysadmin who noticed a 75-cent accounting discrepancy and followed the thread until he uncovered an international espionage ring operating through university computer networks. It read like a thriller, but every word of it was real.
That book generated a deep, lasting passion in me to pursue a career in Computer Science. If someone could track a spy across the globe using nothing but a terminal and persistence, then computers weren't just tools β they were instruments of real power and discovery.
The Books That Built Me
Some other instrumental books I read during this period:
Teach Yourself C++ Programming in 21 Days was my first real exposure to a "serious" programming language. I didn't finish it in 21 days β it took considerably longer β but the idea that I could write programs that did anything I could imagine was intoxicating.
I found Action Arcade Adventure Set at a local bookstore in the Ocean One Mall. It came with a complete framework for building side-scrolling games, and it taught me that games weren't magic β they were code. Code that someone wrote, and code that I could write too.
The Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace fed the part of me that was fascinated by the underground. The idea that teenagers with modems and attitude could infiltrate phone systems and computer networks β it was equal parts cautionary tale and origin story.
The Gateway
My second computer was a Gateway 2000 with an Intel Pentium processor and, crucially, a CD-ROM drive. This was a quantum leap. The Tandy had been a window; the Gateway was a door.
It came bundled with Microsoft Encarta on CD, and I lost hours exploring it. I remember watching grainy footage of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon, narrated with a reverence that made the tiny QuickTime window feel like an IMAX screen. An entire encyclopedia on a single disc β the future had arrived.
Going Online
Soon I realized I needed a modem. The computer was powerful, but it was isolated. I wanted to connect. Off to RadioShack I went to obtain a US Robotics 56k modem β the red and blue box that promised to connect me to everything.
I was hooked. I could dial into the library's Dynix system and poke around. It didn't offer much functionality, but it didn't matter β I was accessing a computer somewhere else through a phone line. The abstraction was thrilling.
With my new modem I could also play Warcraft II over the phone line. You'd call your friend's number, hear the modems screech their handshake, and then you were at war. The latency was brutal and the phone bill was worse, but nothing compared to the thrill of a real human opponent.
America Online
America Online came next. I forget exactly how I received my first CD β it might have been through my friend Johnathan Mohr, who was also into computers and had already signed up for an account. AOL CDs were everywhere in the mid-90s, stuffed into magazines, arriving unsolicited in the mail, practically falling from the sky. But that first one felt special. It was a ticket to a world I'd only read about.
The Circuit City Expedition
I took an Amtrak train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia with my friend Tom Campbell to visit Saint Joseph's University. But the real side quest that day was Circuit City. We were on a mission to procure Final Fantasy VII for PC, along with a Diamond Monster 3D graphics card (powered by the legendary 3Dfx Voodoo chipset) and a Creative Sound Blaster 16 audio card.
I was able to install them both thanks to some newfound hardware knowledge from Johnathan. Cracking open the case, seating the cards into PCI slots, running the driver disks β it felt like surgery. When Final Fantasy VII's opening cinematic played with actual 3D-accelerated graphics and real audio, the entire trip had been worth it.
The Deep End
I went into flow state researching my newfound passion. I became an avid reader of TextFiles.com, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Linux Format, Popular Electronics, Nuts & Volts, and BYTE magazine. Each one peeled back another layer of how the digital world worked β from phone phreaking to kernel hacking to soldering circuits.
Two movies from this era were particularly influential:
Jurassic Park (1993) showed me what computers could create β entire worlds, living and breathing. The scene where Lex says "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" was the first time I'd ever seen someone like me on screen. Hackers (1995) was pure fantasy, but it captured the feeling of the culture perfectly β the irreverence, the curiosity, the sense that the people who understood these machines understood something fundamental about the world.
Local Haunts
A few places in South Jersey fed the obsession:
- The Cyberplant in Hammonton, NJ β a LAN center where I played Quake and experimented with an assembly-line drawing program
- MarketPro Computer Show and Fair β warehouse-sized events where vendors sold components, cables, and software from folding tables
- Tri-State Computer Show β another treasure trove of parts, shareware CDs, and the unmistakable smell of new electronics
1999
By the end of the decade, I was reading Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line and preparing to leave for Philadelphia University. College brought 100MB internet, and with it came a whole new era: ICQ, IRC, peer-to-peer file sharing, Audiogalaxy, my first real encounters with viruses, and a copy of Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition that had no business being on a college student's machine.
I started making regular trips to Microcenter, and the cycle that began with a Tandy 1000SX in Atlantic City continued to accelerate.
But that's a story for another post.