I’ve worked with computers since the early 80s, starting with a Commodore Vic-20 in 1982. My first program was implementing a complete “choose your own adventure” book. I had never heard of Zork.

In high school, we used Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers. I was not able to get into any of the programming classes as a junior, because the classes were all filled by seniors. But they let me into the computer lab in my own time, before and after school and during lunch. After a couple of months had passed, I was already helping the seniors with their work. When I became a senior, I they let me skip the intro class, because I had basically helped teach it the previous year. I went straight into the advanced class, which was Pascal and not Basic. I was on a team of two that finished the class project so fast that the teacher assigned me to a second team where the guy was alone. On that second team, we still finished before any of the others. I graduated in 1984.

In college, my first programming class was in COBOL on IBM 3081 mainframes, using punched cards. Then FORTRAN. Later, I got to revisit Pascal. For my Numerical Methods class, I wanted to learn C. So the grad student who was actually grading the homework for the professor agreed, and we got to learn C together. I was so excited by learning C that every one of my programs executed perfectly, and I turned in all my homework before anyone else. I didn’t even have to take the final, because there was no way I could score low enough for that to hurt my grade. The next major language I learned was Prolog, for what was supposed to be a class in Artificial Intelligence. My senior year, I took a Software Engineering course. I finished my work to graduate in August of 1989, but due to problems with my professor failing to give me a grade before he took a job programming for one of the airlines, I didn’t technically graduate until 1990.

In September of 1989, I went to work for the Defense Communications Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon. My first programming task was helping to port the classified AIRFIELDS database from COBOL-66 to COBOL-77. However, I had learned UNIX in college, and so they also made me the UNIX Adminstrator in the branch. They gave me a diskless Sun 386i soon after I arrived. I got tired of constantly updating the /etc/hosts file from the HOSTS.TXT file from nic.ddn.mil, and so I set up what I believe was the first caching recursive nameserver inside the agency, and learned a lot about bind in the process. Later, when the agency was having a lot of problems with their Internet e-mail service, I got drafted in to fix that, and I learned a lot about sendmail. I did a few other things, including personally pissing off the Director of the NSA with a letter I wrote to the editors of the Communications of the ACM in 1992 (published in November of that year, see http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html), but I still managed to become the official Technical POC for DISA.mil, and I convinced the SIPRnet administrators that they should use the DNS and not HOSTS.TXT tables, as well as using real network numbers as assigned by the NIC instead of just pulling random numbers out of their ass. I also turned several Class B and at least one Class A network back to the NIC, because the agency wasn’t using them. By 1995, I had become the sendmail FAQ maintainer, and that lead to a new opportunity to go work at AOL.

At AOL, I helped install their fifth internet email gateway in my first week there. I did a lot of stuff in a short period of time, and became their Senior Internet Mail Administrator. In 1996, I got blamed for taking down all internet e-mail around the world (as a side-effect of the network outage explained at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-day-america-online-went-off...), and I have been told that both qmail and postfix were created as a result of that incident. By 1997, AOL had become a toxic enough place that I could no longer survive there.

I could go on, but although I remember a lot of these details, I find that I’m not really nostalgic for them. I guess the times were pretty good, but frankly I think the times since then have gotten better and better.

Well, maybe not with regards to the recent US presidential elections. But otherwise, I think many things now are much better than they have ever been for many people, and maybe that scares some of the 1%ers at the top.