Foreword
For better or worse, there are moments in our lives that we can visualize with startling clarity. Sometimes momentous and other times trivial, we’re able to completely recall these snippets of our past even if we can’t remember the day or context. In my life, there’s one moment I’d like to call trivial, but the truth is, it was likely more central in establishing my eventual technology career than I care to admit at social gatherings.
I think it was the early 1980s, but that’s mostly irrelevant. My best friend’s parents recently purchased an Apple II (plus, I think), making my friend the first person I knew with a computer in his house. One day we noticed a seam on the top of the plastic case; we slid the bulking green screen monitor to the side and removed the panel on the top. For the first time, we peered into the inner guts of an actual working computer. This was definitely before the release of WarGames, likely before I’d ever heard of hacking, and long before “hacker” became synonymous with “criminal” in the mass media. We lifted that plastic lid and stared at the copper and black components on the field of green circuit boards before us. We were afraid to touch anything, but for the first time, the walls between hardware and software shattered for our young minds, opening up a new world of possibilities. This was something we could touch, manipulate, and, yes, break.
My young computer career began with those early Apples (and Commodores). We spent countless hours ...
