This is the tenth entry in the O’Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Brian Aker wrote a lot of the code behind Slashdot, works for MySQL, hacks phone systems in his spare time, and is one of the alpha geeks that we love–we know it’s worth paying attention to anything he plays with, because he has a great eye for the interesting and the potentially great.
Brian Aker’s Story
I was lucky to grow up in a house that always had a computer. The
first computer we had that I played with was the Timex Cinclair 1000
(sp?). It came with 2K of memory but we had purchased the expansion
cartridge to extend the memory to an impressive 16K. We also
purchased a printer for it. The printer was a tiny thermal printer
that printed out paper as a scroll. For some reason I got it into my
head in the third grade that what I really should do was write a word
processor so that I could type up papers on it. So off I went to
write a word processor in basic. It took me several days to come up
with something and then I spent all of two hours digging through the
encyclopedia for the information on bees, which is what I should have
been studying. This would hardly be the first or last time I spent
more time writing software to solve the problem, then the time it
actually took to solve the real original problem. My third grade
teacher was more amazed that the paper had come from a computer, then
on the material.
Skip a head a few years and I used my paper route money to buy a
commodore 64. I adored the machine and spent hours on it trying to
find ways to write software and crack video games. I could write
pages of material on the Commodore 64. The floppy drives were pretty
neat to hack, and I replaced the ROM in mine with a DigiDOS ROM. The
power supply would over heat and in the winter I would keep my feet
on it to keep warm. I eventually came up with a water cooling
solution for it. If you let the power supply over heat it would cook
the processor, and while I had modified my C64 to have a socketed
processor, it was a pain to go and buy a new one. Of course I bought
a modem eventually for it and even got it taken away after my parents
watched War Games!
I was first drawn to the concept of wanting access to the source code
of programs I was using when I bought the C64. It would drive me nuts
not to be able to fix programs when they broke on me. I am sometimes
amazed that I own a Mac laptop now a days, since several of the apps
Apple ships are broken in my opinion. With a modem I became
fascinated with BBS’es and this pushed me to declare that I would
only use software that I had source too. I spent hours downloading
BBS software from different bulletin boards just to see how it was
written. I ran a BBS at the time called “Tangent BBS” which changed
software on a nearly weekly basis. I had more fun hacking on the
software running the BBS then keeping the BBS up and running.
None of what I learned about computers came from school. I did try
taking a class on computers in the 8th grade but I quickly discovered
that the teach knew less about them then I did. She made us do
reports on computers and almost everyone gave a weekly report on
whatever game they were playing. I had hoped to learn something about
programing graphics but she skipped that section of the text book. I
gave papers on how to solve Zork and how to use a hole punch to make
use of both sides of a floppy.
I look back at what was available to me as a kid then, and look at
what kids have now. I’ve evolved my thoughts on computers over the
years and now expect them to behave more like appliances, and I see a
future of computer appliances unfolding before me. It does make me
wonder what “computers as appliances” means for kids today. A kid
won’t need to learn much to make a computer work today. Still though,
I see some of the people interacting in the Mozilla project and
realize that kids are pushing software design. The barrier of
entrance is much higher now for programming, but kids are doing it. I
wonder how many of them start off programming just because of
frustrations in the software that is available to them.