Of Pike and Penguins: In The Beginning

This is something I initially wrote back June of last year. It’s part one of a three part story describing how I “found” Linux and turned into a FOSS nerd. I figured it would be worth documenting partially so I wouldn’t forget, and partially because while I am a geek, I am by no means a programmer, and I figure this makes me somewhat unique among typical FOSS nerds so maybe it would be a story worth sharing.

Computers

Computers have always been a part of my life. When I was very young, it was the Commdore 64, and then when I hit Kindergarten and throughout much of elementary school career, it was green-screen IBMs. By fifth or sixth grade the school had graduated to Mac, which I preferred over the IBMs for two reasons: Kid Pix, and fireworks screensavers. Why can’t you find any good old’fashioned Pyro! fireworks screensavers anymore? But I digress.

The internet also exploded onto the scene at about this time; I’ll never forget that random commercial in the middle of kids’ shows saying you could now enter some contest or other by “e-mail”. What a strange new word.

Our beloved Commdore 64 at home finally gave up the ghost when I was in seventh grade and we bought a shiny new computer with Windows 95 installed. For the first time I tried out this “internet thing” myself, though I don’t really remember what I did. I do have a vague memory of talking to my cousin on ICQ, though.

The default web browser was Internet Explorer, which disappointed me because I much preferred the browser with the shiny “N” logo that made sparkles when pages were loading, and had an overall more fun GUI, which, back then, is basically how I judged most programs. But Internet Explorer was what came with the computer, and so it was that the Big Blue “E” would become synonymous with the internet.

Our computer was always having issues so we wound up replacing it and reformatting it several times for the next few years and we cycled through virtually every new Windows operating system up until XP, which is when I graduated high school and got my own computer as a present. It came with Windows XP Home pre-installed and I. Was. Excited. Finally a computer of my own to play my own games on and set my own wallpaper on!

I played a lot of Starcraft. Mostly just games against the AI because my internet access at the time was dialup and very spotty at best. I could get internet access at school, and I found myself joining a few forums, but but I never stayed very long because I couldn’t access said forums from home. Things really started to change in early 2004, though, when I finally obtained home access to high-speed internet…

Enter the Fox

The Big Blue E. That’s what I clicked on to use the internet, and use it I did to explore this big new world that had opened up in front of me. At some point earlier, my brother (who got a computer of his own a few years before I did), showed me this new thing called “Mozilla” which he called “The Browser of Champions,” but I didn’t really get the appeal and went back to my Big Blue E.

Until it decided to start being stupid.

Every so often it would suddenly and out of nowhere decide to open up multitudes of copies of itself. I had no way to stop it until it decided to stop, at which point my taskbar was cluttered with dozens or even hundreds of instances of Internet Explorer, and I had to go through and individually close each of them. I was quite vexed by this and went to the aforementioned brother for help, who gave me a solution that I wasn’t expecting, but which turned out to be even better than I expected:

A new web browser. It was apparently still in Beta; version 0.8, I believe, is where I jumped in.

It was called Firefox.

I was immediately hooked. The kinks were all still being worked out, the browser was still somewhat glitchy in several respects, but I was hooked nonetheless. The Big Blue E was ditched and from that day on, it was the still mint-new logo of a fox circling the globe that would then define the Internet.

Perhaps most importantly though, Firefox showed me something that I hadn’t even known existed. See, I like to research things, just to learn more about them, and so naturally at some point I stumbled across something or other about Firefox and I was reading it and discovered a new term: Open Source.

Hackers

My very earliest introduction to Linux was this thing that my brother showed me called Knoppix. From what I understood at the time, it was a CD that you put into your computer that turned you into a hacker.

Let’s stop and talk about this for a bit. Although my personal definition of the word “hacker” has changed throughout my life, I can never remember it being a negative word. At the time that I was shown Knoppix, a “hacker”, in my understanding, was a cross between Neo from the Matrix, and Robin Hood. An outlaw with a heart who stole code from the rich to give to the poor. Someone who was probably scary but was still, at heart, a Good Guy. I have no idea how this picture got painted in my mind. It was possibly inspired by the “I Know Unix” girl in Jurassic Park, a movie that I watched about a million times when I was ten years old. But regardless of where I got this image in my head, it was there, and Knoppix was seen as this shiny, offlimits toy that I should never use because I knew I wasn’t Neo or Robin Hood, I was just an ordinary girl, and to use something like Linux would be like stumbling out of my domain and profaning something that was beyond my reach.

And so other than ogling at it one time I went on with the rest of my life, not thinking about it again until going on one of those wonderful zen moments on the computer of just clicking and clicking and learning and learning about new things, and this time it was Open Source I was learning about and somehow I stumbled across Eric S. Raymond‘s website.

It was then that I devoured the Jargon File and became fascinated with this idea of the true, original, dorky MIT hacker. A geek like me, who was also trickster like Br’er Rabbit who made fun things with computers.

Could I do that?

On that site was a tutorial called “How to Become a Hacker“. I gulped it all down and then got to one of the steps:

Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.”

I thought back to Knoppix and how alien it had seemed compared to Windows, with its big terminal and an unfamiliar GUI. Yeah, it was out of my league.

So I decided I couldn’t become a hacker, I wasn’t awesome enough. Fair. I was still fascinated with the idea of Open Source, and became relatively involved in the Spread Firefox community for a short time as a way to prove it. I felt like I’d sort of reached a dead-end, though, and because I was still relatively content with Windows my initial love affair with Open Source sort of faded away.

For the time being…

To Be Continued!

9 thoughts on “Of Pike and Penguins: In The Beginning”

  1. Nerd!
    You keep sending me bAck in time. Lol
    I remember mosaic browsera nd its eventual change to ie.
    Netscape.
    Phoenix browser, which became firebird, which became firefox. Ugh.
    Bbs where I had my first real time chat with someone on a 4 node system.
    EmaIl through bbs was insane. I had an addy, but noone to send email to.
    I remember my first computer being slower than the phone I am replying to this post on.
    TRS80.
    Linux. Before gui.
    Being 16 and setting up novell coax networks for h&r block. (Yeah srsly)
    Ugh. I could go on all day.
    But I won’t.

    Oh; and, FIRST

  2. Ahh… nostalgia. Reading your blog entry transports me back to my freshman year of college when I was introduced to that world… Firefox, Gaim, Gimp…

    I ignored Linux the first few times it was introduced to me as well. Looking forward to the rest of your story!

  3. It’s funny how similar paths to nerdery can be. I too loved ESR’s work, though it was JWZ’s leaving Mozilla that got me into the entire open-source movement.

    I downloaded Mozilla 0.8 and it crashed, a lot. I filed bug reports. Lots of bug reports.

    Then I tried Red Hat.. uh, 6? My spouse was using Linux already (as a scientist), so I at least had a mentor to walk me through it. And someone who told me that I must use tcsh, because bash was no good.

    Yeah. tcsh user, to this day.

    So I’m very much looking forward to the next two parts of this story. ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Heh, I am a bash user, always will be.
    Is it sad thagt the first thing I install on every single gadget is putty/terminal/vnc?

  5. Only if it’s sad that I demanded root access to my Android cellphone. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    “I have physical access to the device, you can not deny me.”

  6. My family’s first computer was a 10MHz AST 286 with a 40MB hard drive, 1MB of RAM, grayscale monitor and a 2400 baud modem; a real beast at the time. My dad got it to work on his thesis while attending Cornell and apparently (I was 5 at the time and don’t remember doing this, my parents told me about it) I really liked dialing in to their UNIX system to check the weather. I do remember playing a few imitation games that were like Snake and Ateroids and Adventure. (Secret code: xyzzy!)

    We didn’t get another computer until the Pentium/Windows 95 days, so I missed the rise of the interwebs, games like Wolfenstein and DOOM, etc. However, I did get in to the BBS scene in the 90’s and that’s what sparked my real interest in computers. The first “program” I ever wrote was a Telemate (The terminal software I used) script to play a text-based RPG for me while I was sleeping. ๐Ÿ™‚

    The iron 286 became mine and went in my room after the Pentium came in to the house and I gave it a few upgrades: a 14.4k modem (No more watching lines fill in as they scroll by), an EGA monitor (16 colors!) and a B: 3.5″ floppy. Eventually the 40MB hard drive died and I was running off a boot floppy, Telemate floppy and a RAM drive in the >640KB space for TM’s scrollback buffer. I had that setup until I was like 16. Good times.

    I do still kinda miss the BBS days. They were like little pockets of internet where you could see everyone online and interact with them. I still have a few IRL friends that I first met on BBS’s.

    /nostalgia

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