In 2nd grade my mom brought home an Atari 800XL and taught me to program in basic. I remember the whirling of the tape and my dad’s country music playing as our programs loaded. In junior high I got a mac classic with a 2400 baud modem. I got hooked on BBSs and pre-www hacked in to the local library’s vax mainframe so I could go on the irc and connect to eskimo north. I remember the ncsa mosiac browser and the birth of the web, not thinking much of it, much the way I think about things like twitter today. In high school I really could not give up hacking computers. I had a nack for finding exploits, so as soon as something was patched I could find another way in. I got caught at some point, and was basically given my own computer. The teachers, the administration and the network administrators were scared, mostly because they could not control my actions. A long and heavy meeting with my parents later, and I was given two options: the alternative school or college. I choose the latter.