The Archive · Practice · 1982–1995
The First Machine
Apple II Plus · age nine
- First machine
- Apple II Plus
- First program
- Age 9 · 1982
- BBS sysop
- Grade 6, on an IBM PC
- First Linux
- Slackware 1.0
Every archive has a deepest shelf. This is mine.
It starts with an Apple II Plus and a nine-year-old who wouldn’t leave it alone. I wrote my first programs on that machine in 1982, and I never really stopped. By grade six I had an IBM PC and was running my own BBS off it, listening for the modem to ring after school. A Commodore 64 came next, then a Commodore 128, each one taken apart in every way a kid could manage.
By the early ’90s it was community college classes at Antelope Valley College and a PC running Slackware 1.0, back when Linux shipped on a stack of floppies and the industry was busy panicking about a security tool called SATAN. Teach the machine something at 2 a.m., watch it obey, realize nobody is going to stop you. That feeling never wore off.
Everything forward of this shelf, the startups and acquisitions and networks and films, is the same loop at larger scale: get curious, build the thing, then figure out how to make anyone care. The last part took me four bubbles to learn properly.
If you’ve walked this far back, thanks. Now follow the timeline home to the present.
