The Early Years

For me, computers are a hobby that turned into a career. My first experience with computers was at the age of 4 when my dad brought me into work at South/Com one Saturday and sat me in front of a keypunch machine to keep me busy while he got his work done. You wouldn't believe how many different ways you can jam one of those things. As a special treat, I sometimes got to go into the main computing room with the raised floors and the huge old IBM Mainframe and peer around at the equipment. There was only one monitor in the whole room back then, and it was a tiny 9 inch glass teletype.

If I was one of those high-powered-killer-genius computer geeks, this is where I would tell you about how I sat down and whipped up a revolutionary new compression algorithm that saved the company millions of dollars. Well, sorry to disappoint you.

Anyway...

When we got an Atari 800 at home, I jumped into the world of AtariBASIC (And of course, Star Raiders). I never really got into BASIC tho, until my brother and I got our Apple //c with a whopping enormous incredible 128K of RAM! How could you possibly need more than that? Most of what we came up with had to do with drawing pretty pictures and arrays on the screen. Anyone remember HPLOT?

I later got to go into work with my mom and play Colossal Cave Adventure on the VAX, also known as adventure. I have played this particular game on every platform imaginable, including the Apple II, Mac, MS-DOS, and UNIXen of all shapes and sizes. I still have an aborted attempt to port it to java lying around here somewhere.

So then I got the Apple //c in 1983 and learned all about AppleBASIC and played plenty of the old cheesy computer games. The Apple was my staple throughout high school, and I didn't touch a computer for the first two years of college. Eventually I fiddled with some of the school's old MS-DOS machines, which I absolutely loathed. I eventually got an account on the school's mainframe and got my first email address: XL50BWF@luccpua.it.luc.edu. Nice, eh?

So, between MS-DOS and TSO, I had a pretty bad experience with computers in college. I consequently avoided command line interfaces for a number of years until I discovered UNIX. So, I bought a Mac SE and twiddled with Hypertalk programming and Lightspeed Pascal.

Then I bought a Powerbook 170 and spent most of my time drawing things in Aldus Freehand. I really liked the Macintosh GUI. I swore up and down at the limitations and stupidity of the command line interface (basing all my opinions on my painful escapades with MS-DOS 3.x and TSO). I looked down on all other OS'es with disdain. I thumbed my nose at the inferior Intel machines and their limited command line interfaces.

And then I discovered UNIX.

Renaissance

My brother gave me an account on force.stwing.upenn.edu, the computer that he had helped STWing get for their members. He was the administrator of force and set up an account for me under the username mgross. The only way I could get into force was via a tn3270 session from Loyola's mainframe, an extremely limited tty emulation. I couldn't use any of the full-screen editors--I couldn't even ytalk--I was befuddled and confused. My brother taught me a handful of commands, but I was still pretty lost. And then I got a dialup account and an account on Loyola's main (and only) UNIX machine for students and staff. I was introduced to pine, tin, and pico via telnet from my Mac.

My brother came to visit me in Chicago and opened my eyes to the true power of the UNIX shell. I learned about command line expansion, history, shell scripting, perl, man, apropos, and enough other little tidbits to keep me busy poking around for months to come. I discovered that UNIX is to a control freak as whiskey is to an alcoholic.

I started hacking some little scripts together in perl and pretty soon I was hooked. Perl was simple enough that I could just sit down and puzzle my way through it and get some work done without worrying about pointers or memory management or garbage collection.

I got a freelance job writing some perl scripts for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and then I bought an Intel machine (most of my friends were shocked when they heard this, convinced that I had been kidnapped and replaced by an alien). I wiped the box, installed Linux and never touched my Mac again (Of course, now I work on Mac OS X).

After I felt like I knew enough about UNIX, I started looking for a full time job doing sysadmin work and programming. Which brings us back to whence you came.