Born on the Island
I was born on February 29th, leap day, in Galveston Island, Texas.
Just the year before, the Altair 8800 personal computer exploded onto the hobbyist scene through Popular Electronics magazine. The year after my birth, personal computers started appearing in stores. The TRS-80, the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and even Atari game consoles all started appearing in homes.
Upon seeing these machines, people reacted with surprise, fascination, and sometimes fear.
At 10 years old, I got my first computer for Christmas: a Commodore 64. The first page of the user’s manual went straight into teaching BASIC programming. No mouse, no gui, no user interface. If I wanted to use my computer at all, I had to start programming.
It didn’t come with any way to save data. No hard drive, no disk drive, no tape drive. I would type programs in manually from computer magazines. Once I finished playing the game I had just spent hours typing in, if I turned the computer off, the game was gone.
Eventually, my mom bought me a cassette drive. Then, I could save my programs to tape. I could even play them on the stereo. It sounded like high pitched beeps and whistles. I thought that was so cool.
I kept seeing ads for modems in the magazines I was reading. Apparently, you could talk to other people through your computer. I was completely transfixed by this idea. I repeatedly asked my mom for one. After seeing the movie WarGames, I became even more annoying about it. But I just got “It’s too expensive”. Much time passed, and I gave up hope.
One day, a friend of my dad just handed me one. “Here you go.” Like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just handed me lightning in a bottle. I couldn’t believe it. It was not a holiday. It was not my birthday or Christmas. He was a computer programmer and just had it laying around. I offered to pay him for it, but he said I could have it for free.
This moment plays in my head sometimes, unbidden, decades later. It’s almost a sacred moment, a turning point. Having a device to experiment with is one thing. Connecting it to other people remotely unlocks its potential exponentially. No one around me understood this. To them, I was just typing on a keyboard for no reason. I was told it was a waste of time. But saying I was excited about this is understating it.
It was a 300 baud modem - already obsolete in 1987. Its speed was glacial. It was text-only and printed maybe one line of text every 3 seconds. You could be waiting 15-20 seconds to read a single paragraph. It’s ludicrous how slow it was.
I remember going to the Commodore Computer Club meeting at the local community college. I stepped into an auditorium style classroom full of strange adults I had never met. Later, in my early 20’s, I would have my first computer programming class in that same room. By that time, I would already know all the course material before I even started the class. For loops, if/then, variables, arrays - it’s all covered in the C64 user’s manual.
At 12 years old, my mom had dropped me off at the college. She didn’t come in with me. I had to walk around and talk to adults by myself. This is how I got the phone number to my first BBS: The Psychotic BBS. From there, I found others: Paradox, The Serial Connection, Jackalope Junction, Antarctica, Middle Earth, Data Plus, and Realms of Thunder. There were dozens.
I would spend the next 10 years talking to people on message boards and playing BBS games like Yankee Trader, Barren Realms Elite, and Legend of the Red Dragon. I learned to communicate through the written word before I learned how to properly interact with people in real life.
By this time, I had a 1541 disk drive and a printer. My favorite games were Zork, Questron II, Predator, and Project Space Station.
I even wrote my own game, a text-based mystery adventure written in BASIC.
At Darby Junior High School, I noticed my science teacher had a C64 in her office. I had this astronomy program, Sky Travel, and I brought it to school to show it to her. I remember she sat down with me after school and let me show her all the constellations. I also printed out the source code to my huge BASIC mystery game and showed it to her.
Mrs. Cawhorn was the only person in my life at that time that showed any interest in my computer fixation. In the 1980’s, mentioning that you owned a computer was the same as saying you were a communist or a murderer. It made you a despicable person. If I told someone I owned a computer, they would make a face of disgust, turn around and walk away, then never speak to me again.
In a weird contrast, they would also say things like, “Oh, so you’re a genius.” I never understood why, but in the 1980’s owning a computer made you a smart person. I think it was perhaps a manifestation of fear. These machines were not understood, and they intimidated people.
I used to play outside a lot with the neighborhood kids. One day, I went into one of the neighborhood kid’s house to get some Kool-Aid. I noticed he had a Commodore 64 set up in a side room on a desk. I was shocked. I asked him if he had any good games for it. He got up in my face real close, balled his fists up, and said, “Listen to me carefully. I… HATE… COMPUTERS! Understand?” He wanted to make sure I knew he had never touched it, and that I would never tell anyone that it existed in his house.
This is what people in the American South were like in the 1980’s.
By now, I had even better games for the C64. The Gold Box games - Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Secret of the Silver Blades.
I continued spending most of my time on BBS’s, interacting with people online and learning about the world. Most people I knew didn’t understand computers at all. That left this as my own private world where I could finally be myself.
It’s hard to explain how different online spaces were back then. People were rude, but these were small communities. You still had to behave yourself to an extent. It was also a completely non-judgemental space. No one used their real names, only aliases (like the CB radios in Smokey and the Bandit). It was impossible to judge someone by their age, sex, skin color, or nationality. The only thing you had to go on was the quality of someone’s writing and quality of the ideas they were putting forth.
I felt like my online persona was the real me, and the in-person me was some avatar that I wasn’t used to piloting. In real life, I was awkward, shy, and often not understood. Online, I was quick, eloquent, funny, and charming. I was an extremely different person. It’s like the computer was a crystal that projected my perfect self onto a wall. In today’s internet, such clarity of self just isn’t possible. I miss that time in my life. I miss the community and the person I was able to be.
The following year, I would enter high school, and absolutely crush the intro to computers class. I would do the daily assignment in the first five minutes of class, then spend the rest of the hour hacking around, writing programs, and helping other students.
When I was 16, I pulled what I thought was a pretty clever trick. I sold my C64 to one of my mom’s friends for $500. She wanted to use it for word processing. I then turned around and bought an Amiga 600 for $500. It was a massive upgrade for me. Neither my mom nor her friend knew how much difference there was between these two machines, and I wasn’t about to tell them.
For one thing, it actually rendered the BBS’s full-color ANSI graphics properly. This would mark my transition from 5.25 inch floppy disks to 3.5 inch floppy disks. The Amiga also had way better games, and it came with a hard drive.
This was still pre-internet days, yet we had a global community already. BBS’s would call each other overnight and exchange messages through something called Fidonet. There were hundreds of different topics with vibrant communities of people.
In 1996, I was 20 years old and working at Blockbuster Video. This is where I finally learned how to properly interact with people in real life. It was a brute force methodology. Watching movies was one of the only things to do for fun at this time, so this was one of the most popular places in town. It was absolutely packed with people all the time. I learned how to multitask and handle multiple people coming at me from different directions, all wanting my attention at the same time. As a shift manager, handling customers and employees was like conducting an orchestra.
Computer enthusiasts were weirdly tribal back then. Each type of computer had its own faction of loyal users who thought their machine was the best. Commodore Amiga users were no different. We would not hesitate to explain to random strangers how its chip architecture enabled superior multitasking.
But two years before, Commodore had gone bankrupt. There had been dismay and disappointment in the community, but we were told that another company was buying Commodore’s assets. People held on to hope. Maybe this new contender will pick up the baton and continue things.
By 1996, the company that had bought Commodore’s assets had also gone bankrupt. I saw the writing on the wall. I cannot continue using a dead platform. I swallowed my pride and went and bought a Windows 95 computer.
My friend, who was the sysop of the first BBS I ever connected to, still toys with Amiga computers to this day. In some people, Amiga loyalty never dies.
For my part, it was time to jump onto AOL and start exploring.
By now, I had finally started taking classes at the local community college. I began learning new frameworks for understanding the world. My first Biology class, taught by an eccentric Indian ornithologist, shattered my superstitious belief system. He taught us the scientific method and why it is necessary, and about how truth can be inadvertently masked by bias and faulty thinking. This class shunted me off onto an entirely new path: one where I valued rationality and skepticism.
Games like Quake II, Half-Life, Diablo, and StarCraft blew our collective minds. Most people still did not understand what the hell we were doing, but people were starting to pay attention. Pop-up booths started showing up at malls selling internet access. More people were catching on.
I remember figuring out that if you signed up with an ISP, you could be on the internet without being on AOL. I thought that was incredible. I struggled to convince anyone else at the time that it was amazing.
Internet culture was very different in this era. We mainly communicated through messaging apps like AIM and ICQ. Most people had public profiles, and I would just message random people all day and strike up conversations. I would talk to complete strangers for hours. Most people were friendly and enjoyed the novelty of meeting new people online. Good conversation was a killer feature of late 90’s internet.
I discovered Linux and started learning Bash. It was janky, and didn’t work half the time. But you could rip apart anything you wanted, see how it worked, and put it back together in a different way. I had a hard time understanding why anyone wouldn’t want to do that, so I would recommend Linux to everyone I met, no matter how computer illiterate they were.
My proudest moment of 1999 was calling up another computer on the kitchen telephone and shrieking into it in my best impression of a dial-up modem. I actually got a connection. I convinced a computer that I was one of them. I hope that when the Terminator drones come for me, they will remember this friendly handshake we once had together.
I have a lot of good memories from this time. Getting on DSL for the first time. Using Napster for totally legal purposes. Listening to 2600’s Off the Hook radio show in RealAudio, then later switching to Winamp. Playing Thief 2 for 36 hours straight, forgetting to eat, then suddenly experiencing crushing hunger. Being obsessed with Deus Ex.
I used ICQ to coordinate with classmates on computer science and math homework. I bought Visual Studio and wrote an Asteroids clone in C++. I learned html and css, and started building websites.
In September, I figured out that an email address existed called ’everyone@westark.edu’. I didn’t think the college administration would be stupid enough to leave that open. I figured it would be protected. But, just for fun, I decided to try. I happened to have a dirty limerick book on my desk, so I typed one in and clicked ‘send’.
I immediately started getting back hundreds of ‘failed to send’ emails. I got this horrible, twisting, sinking feeling in my gut as I realized that I’d actually sent that email to over 5,000 people.
I started getting long hate-mail letters from professors. The next day, the Dean was waiting for me outside my Western Civilization class. He told me that instead of doing what I did, I should have put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. That sounded crazy to me, but he really believed it was the same thing. I was banned from using any computer at the community college ever again. They also shut down the campus email system for a week trying to figure out how to keep it from happening again.
It wasn’t even really that offensive, I didn’t think. It was just a silly limerick, like you would find in an old book from the 1800’s.
This made homework a real pain in the ass to do sometimes. Professors would assign homework that required a computer to do and then refuse to offer me accommodations. I had to approach random students and beg them to help me get homework done. I was kinda famous though, for the rest of the semester. People would tell me the story of what happened, not knowing it was me that did it, and I’d just say, “Oh wow, ha hah… that’s crazy.”
Fortunately for me, the next year, I would start attending the University of Arkansas. I guess they didn’t communicate with each other, because the UofA never brought it up and the ban didn’t affect me anymore.
Photo by Mike Norton / CC BY 2.0
At the University of Arkansas, I tried to have a balance of subjects. I took classes on human evolution, film lecture, and assembler. The diversity of experiences you could sample was much wider.
I was running Slackware Linux with the Enlightenment window manager. My desktop looked incredible. I hate to say it, but this was so much better than Amiga’s Workbench OS.
I bought an old laptop off eBay and used it to take notes in class. It wouldn’t run Windows 98 or KDE, so I installed Linux on it and took notes in vi on the command line. Eventually, I would get it to run IceWM. One classmate asked me if it was Windows CE. People still didn’t know what Linux was. I eventually settled on Blackbox. It looked amazing for how much of a terrible laptop it was.
I had an operating systems class at 7:30 in the morning. The professor, Joe Wiggins, would spend half the time talking about his days building spy satellites for the government. He would say crazy things, like if you stepped outside and lit a cigarette, the government could see that from their satellites. He would say that they tracked everybody, and that they knew a lot more than what they let on. We thought he was crazy. Like, if he really knew all this classified stuff, would he really be able to tell all of us about it? However, ten years later, after listening to Edward Snowden, I realized Joe probably knew what he was talking about.
Another year, I took Object Oriented Programming with Professor Skeith. It turned out, he was a crotchety old man. The type of person whom I am now well on my way to becoming. Professor Skeith did not want to teach object oriented programming. He wanted to teach Perl. So, that is what he taught instead. If anyone questioned it, he would angrily rant that Perl could do anything, even objects. He’d then proceed to teach us regular expressions, which he claimed we would use until the day we retired.
We lived in these roach-infested apartments called “The Chateau”. My wife and I called it “The Shiteau”. We would see police cars with flashing lights weekly for various incidents. We kept our food in sealable plastic containers so the roaches couldn’t get to them. Rent was $275/month.
We had gotten married the year before. Our honeymoon was at Disney World.
Our landlords would regularly shut off the water because there was some kind of water leak in the pipes under the complex. In October, the water was shut off for two weeks. My wife was pregnant with our first child. She would take showers at a friend’s house, and I’d bring home 5 gallon buckets of water from the pizza place I worked at. Eventually, I called the water company to ask them about the issue. They had no idea what I was talking about. They got really mad, and started asking me questions like, “Are you kidding me?” and “How long has this been going on?” Apparently, landlords aren’t allowed to shut off the water to their tenants. It got turned back on within hours of my phone call.
I was starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome. My wrists hurt badly at the end of every day. Doing nothing but typing on a keyboard for the last seven years was starting to catch up with me. I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout, and I instantly went from being a fast typist to hunt-and-pecking. I couldn’t type properly for months. Eventually, my typing speed picked up, and I never had wrist pain ever again. Today, I’ve used a Dvorak keyboard for 23 years. I didn’t do it to be weird or unique or strange. I was just solving a problem.
Post-graduation, I found myself on the Remedy team at Walmart corporate headquarters. We supported an ITSM platform for help desk and change management software.
For the past 18 years, any conversation I had involving computers would more than likely involve the other person not knowing what the hell I was talking about. They inevitably would just wave their hand dismissively, say that I was too smart for them, and give up on the conversation. People seemed to have this idea that I was genetically predisposed to understand technology. That they, not having the genes that I had, had no chance of ever learning it. So, why bother? It’s a way of giving up without trying. I would try to explain that wasn’t true, that I had just been doing this longer than them. It’s just a factor of the time you put into it. But no one would listen. It was like being trapped in the year 100,000 B.C. and having a flashlight.
After getting a job at Walmart, that conversation almost never happened again. Everyone else at Walmart already knew everything I knew. I almost never had any idea what they were talking about. The acronyms and buzzwords were like another language: Walmartese. I had to ask, “What is that?” every 5 seconds. When I looked out onto the volume of things I needed to learn, it stretched out all the way to the horizon. It was a joy to be around so many people like myself.
At the time, new college hires were forced to work in either Field Support or Unix Operations for three months before they were allowed to join their real team. This was Walmart’s way of teaching egotistical programmers that these support teams played a critical role and should be respected. It also doubled as a way for us to learn the company lingo and organizational structure.
Field Support was a help desk for the stores for technology issues. Any programmer that would be writing software for the stores would be placed here, because they ought to know how what they’re doing is going to be affecting other people.
Unix Operations was a level 1 helpdesk for server issues, but it was really more like an ER, or maybe air traffic control. All the most high-stress, high-adrenaline emergencies happening in the IT division were coordinated here. They didn’t just assign tickets to specialist teams. They owned the whole lifecycle of an issue, following up with programmers to make sure they actually solved the problem for real instead of doing a lazy workaround. This is the helpdesk I ended up on, and it was absolutely terrifying.
I would have to answer calls where 12,000 people couldn’t get their email, or 800 people in a distribution center can’t work because some application I’d never heard of is down. I’d have to page out the right team that should own the issue, and then stay on the call and make sure the right experts were on the call and that they weren’t screwing it up. How am I supposed to tell if a software team is screwing something up if I have no idea how their stuff works? After a while, you can tell. You can sense when someone has no clue what they are doing or even when they are about to do something monumentally stupid. It turns out, this is a skill you can get good at.
People in Unix Operations were experts at making sure the right people were working on a problem. And, more importantly, that the wrong people got kicked off. Sometimes, managers would jump on a call completely freaking out, with unmitigated panic, or even with explosive anger. I was surprised to discover that these people were not respected. They would get corralled off into side conversations with other managers. It turns out, highly charged emotional reactions do not help in emergency situations. It’s almost guaranteed to ensure that the situation doesn’t get resolved. The tone we sought to achieve on a call was, cold, calm, reasoned logic. Question everything. What about this? Are our base assumptions wrong? Have we considered other possibilities? I learned a lot about how to manage emergency situations in my three months in Unix Operations.
Eventually, the policy of new college hires having to work on helpdesks for three months was dropped. Over time, I watched as the engineers’ opinions of Unix Operations dropped through the floor. “They’re glorified phone jockeys”, I heard many times from people angry that they were being held to account. This is not my view, and I will always have the utmost respect for these people.
Once I got past the initiation and was on my programming team, I set about redesigning the UI layouts of the ticketing forms. It looked abysmal, like someone had taken all the fields, put them in a cup, shaken the cup as hard as they could, then dumped it haphazardly onto the form. Why anyone would do this is beyond me. The fields didn’t even line up properly, nor were they grouped together in any way that made sense. If you sat with them and watched them take a call, you’d see them click over here, type something in, then click into another field in a seemingly random location on the other side of the screen, then click somewhere down on the bottom. It was crazy. The only way for them to work was to rely on brute memorization of where things were. I asked one of them once, “Why in the world didn’t you tell anyone you have to do this?” They just replied, “Oh, I thought it had to be that way.” Once you’re in a place like this long enough, learned helplessness settles into your psyche, and you give up trying to change things.
When I had been working in Unix Operations, I’d taken tons of notes on how they used Remedy and what their process flow was like. When they took a call, what information did they ask for? What fields did they most commonly use, and for which situations?
I took all these notes and redesigned the form layout to fit their workflow. There were probably hundreds of fields, and they maybe used two dozen most of the time. I grouped all the fields together into various boxes by purpose. I added tabs and put everything they didn’t always use onto the other tabs. I’d sit down with them, show them the new form, and get their opinions on what fields should be renamed and where things should be placed. In no way did I unilaterally decide how things should be. I made sure it was what they wanted. The result was so much more efficient to use. Information was easier to locate and ticket submission was much smoother.
I would later do this for the Field Support help desk as well. Their layout had been worse. This didn’t require much programming on my part. Just moving fields around in the editor is easy. But sitting with other people, figuring out what their workflow is like, getting their views on what they want, these things make a difference. It was nice to see the look of relief on their faces.
The Remedy system had thousands of users and hosted 800+ in-house applications. Because it was used by Unix Operations (and every other helpdesk), and they had the power to escalate issues, any problem with Remedy was immediately escalated to the highest level possible. They operated 24/7 and had no patience for downtime.
As a result, it was architected for as close to zero downtime as possible. The database was an Informix HDR pair, which shipped and applied logical logs from the primary DB to the secondary continuously. There was a primary and secondary app server, both running instances of the application. The system could fail over basically instantly, and unless it fell into a weird infinite-failover loop, the helpdesk would usually not even notice that the application had failed over.
Linux was not trusted at Walmart in 2006. It was considered a toy, and the big dogs were HP-UX and AIX. They had big companies behind them, and were considered reliable. My team wrote mostly C and Perl applications. They didn’t trust Java, which they considered big and slow. They didn’t trust virtual machines, either, and wanted to keep everything on bare metal. There was a paranoia that other applications would “steal” our cpu and memory, causing production issues whose root cause would be invisible to our team. In retrospect, technologies that will eventually take over always start out rough, and there have always been experienced engineers who won’t trust anything new.
Observability was handled a few ways. We had the standard alerts on diskspace, cpu, and our app process. There was also one logged in to Remedy every minute and triggered if it took over X seconds to log in.
We also had a system that would show us the top running SQL queries. Being a ticketing system, there were a lot of reports being run. But some fields were indexed and some were not, so there was some expertise involved in writing a “good” query. I would look at the long-running queries and reverse engineer who was running them for what reason. Sometimes, I would just cold call people on the phone and ask them what they were doing. This always panicked them, like they had been caught doing something wrong, instead of using the system for what it was designed for. One person told me that they had been running a macro, and that everyone at their vendor used that same macro. I asked them to send it to me. I rewrote it to use an indexed field, then sent it back to them. I asked them to pass the new macro around to everyone in their building. This one action lowered our application server’s CPU usage from 80% to 60%.
