Meeting My First Hacker
It must have been my sophomore year of high school. Possibly freshman – doesn’t matter. My math class gets invited to see some sort of demonstration by the computer class. I guess they were promoting/recruiting. The teacher (One of many in my educational career who was in their last year of teaching before retirement.) gave some pitch about computers which had no impact on me.
There was one student in the class that was an aspiring hacker. Smart, really smart. Pale skin. Hair: long, a little messy and on the greasy side. In their demonstration code, he managed to slip in a line that made the computer “ding” eight times. Not necessarily computer genius by today’s standards, but it was the fact that he put it in there without the teaching knowing. She didn’t punish him, but let it be known that she was not aware of this. The little imp! Here was a kid who made an effort to learn something and had the balls to put it out to the public and say, “Look what I can do.”
That wasn’t me, but it in a way it was. That’s something I would do. If I either stumbled on something in my studies or was directly looking for a way to do something, I would look for a way to be able to make that statement, “Look what I can do.” That never happened because, I did not take the accelerated math. Didn’t take math my senior year. Avoided taking physics because I was certain the teacher was a homosexual. Many issues in a series of choices to underachieve. In time, I came around.
