Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

When I was in middle school my brother started playing half-life 1 followed by counter-strike. This got me into playing counter-strike, and then eventually damn near all other half-life mods. This just generally helped my computer literacy as eventually I would learn how to mod existing mods.

Slowly I started to come to terms with the idea that I too could build things like the half-life community had done. I bought myself a huge book on C++ and went through it about 3 times. Then bought another 2 C++ books and started making small projects (tic tac toe, pong, game of life, tetris, etc).

I decided that I'd probably enjoy doing it as a career. I went into web development because that seemed like the path of least resistance. I always had a peripheral understanding that Linux was a thing, but I tried out Ubuntu briefly in 2012 and ended up breaking the install due to my unfamiliarity with it.

In 2013 I was applying for jobs and one of them had a requirement for you to download a git repo, make a few changes, and then submit a pull request. While doing this my laptops hard drive died. Fortunately my laptop had two drives -- one was a 20 gig SSD which housed Windows (this one died), and one was a 500 gig drive which housed all the data. I had a deadline by which I had to submit the change, so I decided to install Linux (Mint this time) on the working drive and continued from there. I ended up liking Linux Mint a lot, it's what all my devices still use today.

Regarding "tech", I got into programming on the Commodore C64 (Basic, MOS6510 assembler) at a tender age, and moved to the Atari ST 520+ (Pascal, C, Modula-2, Fortran, Forth). The former forced you to go into the weedly deeply if you wanted to use graphics programming, so I did. The latter was a beautiful machine to learn (32 bit linear address space!). I wrote my first game on the C=64, and my first compiler on the ST as well as a statistics package for a relative who used it for his quality assurance work at his job.

Back then, if you wanted information, you had to hang out in the magazine section of the local bookshop, where you would eventually meet other people buying the same magazines. Each issue contained software (games, tools) as BASIC or hex printouts that you could type in. We would dictate each other the hex codes, swap cassette tapes (a music medium repurposed for storing programs and data) and share what we had learned ("Try POKE 650,128 if the cursor flashing bothers you."). I still memorize the memory map of the Commodore (what is where in the 64k memory cells 0...65535).

To get hold of Linux as a teenager, I had to ask my mother to drive me to the nearest university in 1992, to be able to download 50 3.5" floppy disks worth of an early distribution (Softlanding Linux System (SLS)/Slackware). Because two disks were faulty, the whole process had to be repeated. I will never forget the moment the X11 logo appeared on my 33 MHz 80486 (4 MB RAM, yes that's "MB", not "GB"), which was especially purchased to run Linux.

At university, I learned Scheme and C systems programming on "proper" UNIX workstations (HP 9000s running HP-UX 9.03) with 21" colour CRTs. After working multiple jobs on top of full-time studies, I was able to buy myself a refurbished HP 9000/715-75, which occupied most of my 9 m² student dorm room. Unlike any PCs that my friends used, this box ran for 6 years with no single crash.

Today, I run an R&D team at a large international information company, where we conduct applied scientific research in machine learning, natural language processing and search engines.

80s: Dad bought me a Big-Trak and later a Commodore as a child, Mom an Intellivision, and I took to them all quickly. But, I used a computer rarely for almost a decade after that because it was so early.

90s: Had given up temporarily at community college because I didn't know what I wanted to do, i.e. was aimless and had no guidance. After getting laid off (with severance pkg) at a good hospital job I had by chance, I decompressed for a week or two and contemplated what to do with my life. Any medical industry advancement required a four-year degree, a no-go in the short-term.

At random chance, a catalog for the local "adult school" came in the mail with lots of "computer classes." I thought well, this stuff isn't going away, it just keeps growing every year, and imagined whatever office-drone job I ended up at would need "computer skills." Things had changed a lot, Commodores/TRS-80s were obsolete and everything was PCs and to some extent Mac. (I knew nothing about big-iron, War Games was my only exposure. :-) What the hell, let's take a class, shrug, couldn't hurt. Thankfully, it was study at your own pace, which I always loved. No dummies to hold you back, amirite?

A few days later a lightbulb popped up over my head... it was 9:30 pm and the school said it was time to shut down for the night. I'd been there since eating lunch and completely forgotten about dinner. It was perhaps the third night of the first week, pushing ~40 hours already. "Wait, what am I doing here?" Playing with computers all day and night. "Woah, I must love this stuff." Not too surprising from this angle, as I loved tinkering with gadgets and playing video games as a youngster.

In a year or so, I'd gotten a PC computer-repair certificate, a Mac desktop-publishing certificate, got Netware certified, hooked on multi-player Doom, all of which had taught me about "LANs" which were becoming the rage. Built computers from spare parts. I saw a magazine article and asked the teachers about Unix. One said he'd used it and it was "more elegant" than DOS. Intrigued, I downloaded a trial, maybe from a BBS (can't remember), I think it was a version of Minix, and kicked the tires for a few days. (Also, met a friend still in high school, as mentioned below.)

Mid 90's: Having exhausted the adult school, it was now time to get a job. I walked into my first or second interview at the Rockwell Science Center (think Space Shuttle) and talked about what I'd learned. Can you start Monday? God, I miss that. Now had a fun IT job with incredible resources at my disposal: PCs, Macs, Suns, SGIs, Crays, Networked printers, even a VAX held on tight by an old curmudgeon scientist.

It was a great time to be there—we were on the internet at work 24/7 via T1 with no firewalls. I was crushing my job and still running Quake servers on the side. Was a sought-after expert at loading DOS TSRs into high memory to get lab equipment working. Had a front-row seat to the rise of Mosaic, Netscape, Winamp, and Napster. First learned Linux from installing Slackware from tens of floppies, until a guy said, "Oh, I've wanted to try Red Hat."

Later, I became the resident Windows 95 expert as well, because my friend from school was providing me with the betas he'd signed up for. Once, we were having our weekly IT meeting with my boss (and boss's boss) and he was pleased we were getting an early drop on W95 as it was a big change coming.

"So, who is your friend? Is he some VIP at a big-company getting access?"

"No," I said. "He's a high-school student!" BWAH HAHA HA....

Not long after that I realized I liked programming too, and that it made good money. Went back to community college, this time with a purpose and got an AS degree in CS. Wish I'd continued because stopping there became an impediment later. But, I was making big-bucks at 25 and loving it, more school to learn theory didn't seem like a good deal. Also didn't anticipate degree inflation and hordes of "fakers." :-(

After XP I'd decided I'd had enough of Windows and moved to Linux and FLOSS full-time, though a few jobs have forced me to use it briefly. Lots more to tell, but that's good for now. ;-)

>"It feels like web programming has changed completely, and I'm not that old!"

I wrote my first web program sometime in the first half 90's I think. It was native custom HTTP server that would generate HTML and little bit of JavaScript as it was not all that powerful back then. Fast forward 25 years: it is still native servers but instead of rendering HTML they send JSON data and JavaScript does all the rendering and interaction. So not much change at all.

As stupid as it sounds, my first introduction to programming and "hacker" culture was AOL chat rooms, people used "scrollers" which would paste ascii art into AOL chat rooms at the press of a button and I wanted to know how that was done so I learned some Visual Basic with the functions AppActivate and SendKeys. I was 12 and in 6th grade at the time.

After being kicked off of AOL for that and other DoS related crap related to these silly "progs" I was making, I had to get a different local dialup ISP and find a new way to chat (IRC).

People used to send the IRC CTCP "VERSION" command to see what IRC client you were using, and the folks in the leet haxor chats such as #2600 would make fun of you for being a newb if you were on mIRC (and thus Windows) and not Linux or *BSD.

So I had to figure out Linux so I could be cool, which was kindof a pain in the ass in 1997 still. Hardware support for things like ethernet and video cards often required recompilation of the linux kernel just to get it working etc. I learned a lot from that and often stayed up until 6 in the morning much to my parents concern and dismay.

But luckily for me, who did poorly at school for lack of interest and didn't go to college, the computer/coding thing turned out OK for me. I'm 36 and work at one of the big companies and make a pretty good living as an SRE. Somewhat ironically, I work at Microsoft now.