Burn In 9: Brian Aker

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.