Long haired not so little bastard

In high school, as my love of hard rock.. in particular Guns N' Roses grew, so did my hair.  Tough call in a bush school. I'd taken enough crap from the locals a few years before because I was a "city kid", so this set them right off. 

The possession of a bass guitar however changed my social status in my own town (I went to school in a different town). The locals who'd hated me as the "rich kid" (hardly true, but in a low income town we were noticeable), now wanted to be friends. It took a few years but we finally had things in common. And I discovered Jimi Hendrix. 

In my (first) high school we learned to type on typewriters. It was compulsory, and I was fast. Hitting 40wpm with about 95% accuracy - well above what the rest of the class could do. For whatever reason, I was unable to get into the Computers class in year 8, so I applied in year 9. I'd used the room a few times, and I was prone to fiddling. On the first day, I went into the classroom, excited to finally be able to learn something. The teacher walked in, took one look at me and left. I wasn't a troublemaker of a student - at least not in the classroom. I tended to nail down and  do my work. 10 minutes later the teacher returns and tells me that I've been moved. They decided that I needed to go and do year 8 Geography, and that was it. Embarrassing. I heard many years later that the same teacher was done for child porn, and they found some on the school computers. Hmmm.

We moved interstate after that year (and not that far away). We moved into a small "city". There was less shock and horror of a dude with purple lenses and long hair. I amassed more friends in the first week than I had in my entire life. What those country folk couldn't accept about me was either ignored or embraced by these folks. I was still considered "out there", but it wasn't something that would get you beat up... though the unknown factor created enough fear that I might be the one doing the beating up if it come down to it. I attracted a couple of friends who had reputations of being rough and quite happy to put people in hospital for getting out of line. For a rebellious teenager, that's not the worst kind of friend to have. 

I managed to get through year 10 without too much drama. I wasn't home much, I  didn't fail anything, and I fit more experience into one year than most teenagers fit into their entire teens and 20s.  

The computer teacher was someone I had an interesting relationship out of the gate. He realised that I'd managed to get past all of his little "security" measures in the labs, and noticed that the planned  lesson content was something I was doing in a matter of minutes, leaving me too much free time that was being spent doing disruptive things.. like replicating virus behaviours, compiling them into executables and putting them into the autoexec.bat to start with the machine... then there was that time the whole lab started playing tunes from the tiny PC speakers. He gave me useful things to do before long - look for locally stored files, check the content, and clean up the garbage. So I did.

Year 11 was a new year,  and a year where one of my closest friends - one with said reputation got himself into a pickle. He'd already done his dash before I met him, having taught a lesson to someone who insulted his mother. One impulsive, stupid decision and his inability to apply common sense after the fact took him and another friend out of my life for a year. 

This change in my world challenged me: I couldn't keep doing what I had been -  people who were into that kind of trouble were going to drag me into it, and I didn't want that. So I did what any reasonably intelligent 16 year old should do. I started paying more attention to my school work.

We saw the Internet for the first time that year. We promptly wound up in a competition to build a website. It didn't win, but we had our first ever digital photo taken with the schools' expensive Sony Mavica camera, and cutting the image down to a size we'd call a thumbnail these days just in order to make the load time reasonable.

Year 11 turned into Year 12. The subjects were harder, and I had a license and mum let me use her car. Free periods were spent doing other things.

A frequent use of lunch breaks  was to walk into town, go to the local computer shop and go through the dump bin they had of old driver disks for 20 cents each. A new 3.5" disk was over $2, and my PC only had a 120MB hard disk, so space mattered. We'd go in sort through the disks, hoping we might discover something interesting in there as we'd load up boxes full of them. On a budget of $10 each, we could go out, get a box of disks, and still afford  a coffee and share a bowl of chips and still have a couple of dollars left. It was effective.

My best mate by now was a guitar playing computer nerd. He was religious, and didn't get himself into trouble but he did cop a lot of bullying. Until I got into the middle of it. My previously set reputation had resulted in few people wanting to stir me up too much, and that had a useful flow on effect. I could help protect my mate. I'd let him take a bit - that's healthy, but if you touched him, you were going to get hurt. Most people thought he was the nerd between us. He had the internet at home already, and he carried his massive laptop to school as he had writing difficulties. 

He introduced me to a local IT guy who wound up supplying us with a lot of old hardware. Mostly XT era gear at the time when Pentium was now the thing everyone wanted.  I had an uncle who was computer mad, who attended swap meets. He wasn't much of a person - he was a much better drinker than he was  computer guy (and he was right into his computers), but he came up with the goods often enough - stacks of 8 and 16 bit ArcNET network cards, disks upon disks upon disks of tools, applications and later burned CDs of entire BBS rips. 

We'd learned we could convert XT power supplies in AT by adding an additional negative line. I had a stack of XTs each running a pair of 10MB hard disks, running DOS and Little Big LAN on Arcnet. All configured to give my PC additional storage. 

We blew a few power supplies, tripped a few RCDs. Burned a lot of power. 

My uncle sent home a modem one day - an old Netcomm 2400 baud, with its still new in the box Telecomm license card permitting it to be plugged into a phone line. 

I'd done some research elsewhere and  new about a stack of exchange numbers that could be used for various things - services that allowed me access to entire news report archives and what not. These were great. No cost to use, local calls, and I could do things with them. 

Eventually I received a set of Telstra BigPond disks. They didn't have a local point of presence, so they required dialing a freecall number, and they charged a rather expensive $7 an hour. I did get some free credit. 

It wasn't long before BigPond was too expensive. I wound up finding a local provider who was $2 an hour, and didn't actually care if I paid the $40 sign up fee. I just had to give them some money for credit. It was good, but the connection was slow given I had a modem 1/10th of the speed of what most people were using at the time.  I also had trouble paying my internet bill. The owner suggested that I could come do some work for him and he'd ignore my bill.
What does a 17 year old without an after school job do? He goes and does work for the ISP. They didn't want much - just their old BBS put back together. 

This suited me. I was mostly downloading drivers. Occasionally I'd deal with people. During holidays I was in the office, which suited the owner. He was also a programmer, and was prone to working all night. He'd vanish for a couple of hours and I'd be left with it all. I learned a bit about the mechanics of things while I was there.

One day during Year 12 Computing, I'd had a blow out with the teacher. He'd been riding me hard all year - I'd been doing what I thought was  good work, but I was getting average marks compared to those with much less of a clue. He mentioned something about the entire backhaul being used by ISPs as belonging to one company. He was wrong. I knew this because I'd seen updated network maps. He wouldn't believe me. So I stormed out of the classroom. I went to work, collected it and returned. Somehow I didn't wind up getting suspended for that stunt. When I finally saw my grades, it dawned on me that what he wrote on my returned work wasn't the grade he'd given me. He was just trying to push me to go harder and harder, but had been grading me fairly.

I'd applied to study a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Psychology. I don't recall why. I'd been interested in law  and journalism up until that point, but law was hard as hell to get into, and I'd decided that journalism had gone down the drain and wasn't worthy of my time. Understanding how the brain worked sounded like a challenge. 

After being accepted,  my father asked me why on earth I'd applied for that - I didn't like people all that much, so why would I want to be a shrink? I had 2 computing awards under my belt, I'd worked for an ISP  and possibly that should have been a hint as to what I should be doing..  Ahh.. yeah. Duh.

How about a Bachelor of IT? Move 300km. Try to live alone, on not a lot of money. Find housemate. Cool guy, crap car. Decide Hackers was a cool comedy movie.  Build network. The University recommended ISP who was apparently the only one we could use for access to internal systems had taken me offside. I'd politely suggested that the 80MB per month quota on their $40 a month service wasn't really adequate. I'd been responded to by their CEO suggesting that I'd have more luck teaching my grandmother to blow a goat than I'd have bleating at them about their plans. Said response was CC'd into the head of school. I was living in my dead grandmothers house, and to be honest, if he'd have said that to my face, I'd probably just be getting out on good behaviour now. I'd started using Linux, and needed to get online with it, and struggled. I'd called a lot of local ISPs looking for support. One local ISP turned the tables on me - he asked me a bit about my experience, and I mentioned that I'd worked for another ISP in SA. He offered me a job there and then - they needed people to go install internet connections - many people still had Windows 3.1 and 95a, and didn't have TCP/IP stacks. The kits were too hard for most people to install. They charged a flat fee, and it was to be paid in cash to the installer.  That was mine. Anything else they needed was at a rate set by me, to be paid in cash.  One install a week alone  was beer and pizza money. Plus I had an unlimited dialup account for free. 

My housemate Mik and I were not great students. We were both distracted. I was becoming a huge Kevin Mitnick fan and there was a lot of weight going on for the Free Kevin movement.

It was still a hard slog being an IT student - the computers were slow and the applications with them. Multimedia  was being a major part of the content, and it was easy to get left behind. All it took was one crash, and you'd loose 10 minutes  waiting for the machine to get back to a login screen, and you'd be stuck starting again. It was a new course, and there were a lot of fresh forgiven academics trying to teach it. 

I left at the end of the first semester. I'd learned some things, but I wasn't focused enough. I couldn't get my head around programming, and I didn't have (and still do not) have the attention span to be lectured to for 3 hours.  

I moved home, and an old school mate hooked up me at the servo he worked out. They still did drive way service. It wasn't the most comfortable of work. Out in the rain, the heat, the hail. It meant getting under bonnets, checking oil, changing batteries, washing windows, cleaning toilets and occasionally being the hero to some young lass who managed to flood it in the driveway and couldn't get their car started again. It meant picking up the papers and getting there 30 minutes early to get the compressor warmed up, finding the driveway already full  of people waiting for you to turn the pumps on in the freezing cold rain. It was honest work, and I was young. I could open, work till 2pm, go home, get clean, come back at 7pm and help my mate shut up at 9pm, hit the town till 3am, go home, tidy up,  uniform on, and get the next shift ready on Sunday at 5am. Crazy stuff.

Eventually I saw a job for a computer tech.