Memories of a 30-Year-Old Non-Coding Hacker
by Nico Andrews
I was born in 1994, which means that I recently turned the same age that my father turned only three hours prior to a whole new century beginning and three whole hours before the Pacific time zone awaited the world-ending change of the computer clocks. I was five years old then and, at that point in my life, I struggled to understand why the kindergarten teacher changed all four-year digits on the wall when we returned to class. I also struggled to understand why I had to adhere to the arbitrary rule of capitalizing the first letter of my own first name.
One thing I wasn't struggling with was pointing-and-clicking around my dad's Hewlett Packard Pentium II PC running either Windows 95 or Windows 98 and likely less than 128 megabytes of RAM. We had three games that my dad allowed my older sister and me to play on the computer: Red Baron, MegaGames (a shareware sampler), and eventually, Humongous Entertainment's Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside.
My father explained that any of the games contained on the MegaGames CD-ROM required that I double-click the .EXE files in the Windows Explorer. This dumbfounded me, as the images on the CD-ROM case showed an easily browsable menu which definitely didn't coincide with what he was telling me. I only recently rediscovered the CD-ROM in a box in his garage (but no HP Pentium II unfortunately), and learned that the CD-ROM was actually meant for MS-DOS. At some point, within six months to a year on either end of the memory of watching my dad turn 30 three hours before the Y2K bug was set to cause a world meltdown, I remember falling asleep under one side of his large corner desk while he AIM'ed with his longtime friend using a 2400 baud connection and memorizing the sound of the dial-up modem connecting to the AOL networks eventually resulting in a "You've got mail" audio prompt through the speakers.
I was fortunate to have a father who got his undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley in the early 1990s, as I don't think that he would have seen the value or worth in the technology otherwise. I recognize that my siblings and I are lucky that he always found a way not only to afford a home/family PC, but also a connection to the Internet all throughout my life. I myself in my middle school years would heavily utilize AIM to chat with my friends even if my Internet connection no longer relied upon AOL dial-up connections.
I miss Windows XP and I am nostalgic for those days of playing RuneScape, Age of Empires, or The Sims 1 and 2; learning to rip audio CDs and make my own custom mixes; as well as waiting all night for LimeWire or Kazaa to download entire CD albums, only for each song to be either just a song sample, a Rickroll, or Bill Clinton's famous clip about Monica Lewinsky. Only once I learned about Ubuntu Linux in 2008 did I realize the full potential of what a computer could do.
All throughout my time in public school, I was exposed to systems of all kinds, whether it was learning to type from Mavis Beacon on Windows ME computers or The Oregon Trail in a lab full of old yellowed Apple Macintosh computers. My middle school had both Mac and Windows computer labs. The Mac lab was full of slimline iMacs, the sample music for which included Nirvana's Rape Me on iTunes. I learned about the backdoor Windows XP Pro Admin account that could be accessed by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del at the login screen on school computers, which enabled me to run programs that I wanted to run (and on one particular school computer to create my own admin account on that particular workstation). Eventually, I was running my own apps and Linux distros off a USB flash drive.
At home, the family computer was upgraded to a Gateway desktop with its infamous cow patterned color schemes and designs and, at one point, I accidentally lost all the family photos thinking I was partitioning a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows XP system. When one of my uncles moved in with us after experiencing a mental breakdown and subsequent divorce, he used a part of his work disability settlement payout on computer parts and, for the first time in my life, I learned how to properly build a computer part by part - and enjoyed top of the line gaming on a big screen TV at that.
I wasn't ever gifted or able to purchase any of the latest tech growing up, but I was fortunate to have cousins and friends who would give me their one-year-old devices to jailbreak or tinker with on my own, whether they were an iPod Touch or the original Sony PSP. These various tech acquisitions from friends and family allowed me to sell various random old computer parts for a one-way ticket to the town where I would be attending college.
In my college years, I grew less enchanted with Windows system "upgrades" after the Windows 8 drastic user interface change (I tolerated it and for a solid moment embraced it, only to realize how terrible it actually had been upon Windows 10 being released). Having a little bit of my own money working a job at a pizza restaurant, I was able to afford paying for apps and online purchases for the first time in my life and not rely on torrents.
I recently felt saddened at the idea that software, especially that which allows for the electronic creation of art and media - ahem Adobe - would forever be bound to monthly or yearly extortion subscription payments and that physical media would become a hobby for collectors and not those who might truly appreciate the software for all it can/could do. James Bridle offered me some commiseration about this notion in his recent book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future where he describes in one chapter the idea that true innovation due to hardware or software limitations has ceased to increase at the rate it once did due to Moore's fLaw [sic].
While computer building remains to be a big part of PC culture, I sense a shift in its essence as it becomes clearer that specialization of computer hardware in the same way that once existed in the early 1990s and 2000s is becoming increasingly rare. Gone are the days of quirky ideas and, increasingly, only that which can be commodified into a micro-transactional subscription-based model survives. Those who are growing up in today's world may never know what it was like to pirate share software and media as those of my generation did, nor will they have the same amount of fun in browsing retail store racks for random never-heard-of third -arty peripherals and accessories in the same way. The subreddit r/pcmasterrace will indicate as much if you spend any time in the comments of posts made since the start of the pandemic.
More and more, I see headlines lamenting the idea that high schoolers who graduated between 2016 and 2024 are entering the workforce with less and less basic computer literacy, possibly due to Chromebooks obscuring even further a basic understanding of computer files and file structures. The examples cited range from social media - Chinese-owned or not - serving as a repository of videos that many Gen Zs are perfectly comfortable using as their photo and video backups instead of paying for storage.
I sense that this obfuscation of data structures and ownership to the end user is intentional on the part of big tech regardless of malintent. I also sense that despite their claims that youths of today will never know the struggle of just how slow HDDs were or just how incredible it is that a small flash drive in 2024 can hold as many as 728,177 3.5 inch floppy disks, they are in fact finding other ways of hacking tech, but at a cost that generations past never necessarily realized.
Google Drive may have created a generation of kids who don't know what a PDF is, but it also created a generation of kids who utilize that same system to send their friends copies of college textbooks that cost way too much on top of exorbitant tuition on top of the highest costs of housing ever experienced in American history. My YouTube feed has recently been playing videos uploaded in 2024 that have a very 2001 visual quality to it. I suspect it has more to do with the webcam quality of Chromebook the person has owned since their high school or middle school days - and still the song or cover they uploaded is lit.
I still try to upgrade and max out the internals of the computers in my life, including the annoyingly difficult to upgrade iMac of 2019 that my partner purchased on Facebook Marketplace. I dual-boot Windows 11 alongside Kali Linux - ironically on an HP laptop purchased in 2022 - and run my own personal Linux cloud server for my iPhone photo backups because I don't trust that Google or Apple won't expose my images to some third-party, or worse, utilize my photos for training harmful AI programs for nefarious non-ethical actors around the world.
Some folks might not consider anything I have offered here to be "hacking" in its traditional sense, I know. But there's more to hacking than simply laboring to find an exploit buried in lines of code or in some hardware architecture for unlocking the true power of physical devices and processors. There is a communal spirit in hacking that still exists if you go in search of it. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and many other similar groups/companies/organizations are just a few efforts which, at their core, bridge gaps between people of different space-times - and 2600 is one medium for connection between space-times as well.
The shared mutual belief in collaboration despite limitations inherent with any electronic device or application or system indicates (at least to me anyways) that communities which foster the hacking spirit can and will continue to provide for generations to come.