It all started in a dark alley.

It was 1992. I was 11. A shadowy figure leaned in and whispered,
“Hey kid… this fell off the back of a truck. You interested in a state-of-the-art Packard Bell?”

No dummies. You didn’t really think that’s how this started, did you?

Gotcha.

Christmas, 1993 — Berwyn, Illinois

The real beginning was Christmas morning, 1993 — at my grandparents’ apartment in Berwyn, Illinois.

Before any wrapping paper came off, something important was explained to me:
I wouldn’t be getting many presents that year… just one big one.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my entire family had pooled money together for this moment. Looking back, I’m guessing it was close to two grand — a fortune in the early 90s, especially for a working family.

When I finally opened the box, I had no idea my life was about to be re-wired forever.

The Machine

A Packard Bell.

A blazing-fast 486DX2.
4 MB of RAM.
A massive 400 MB hard drive.

Back then, this thing might as well have been a spaceship.

There’s that famous Bill Gates quote: “640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone.”

Yeah… about that.

What I saw instead was something completely different:

An infinite world.

Breaking Things (and Fixing Them)

I didn’t use that computer.

I attacked it.

I broke it in every way you can imagine — and a few you probably can’t.

I crashed it.
Locked it up.
Deleted things I shouldn’t have deleted.
Edited things I didn’t understand.
Reinstalled things I didn’t know I broke.

And then I fixed it.

Over.
And over.
And over again.

That loop — break → fix → understand → repeat — became addictive.

That’s where I fell in love with what I still call being a hacker.

Not in the movie sense.
Not breaking into banks.

In the real sense:

Someone who refuses to accept that something is “just the way it works.”

The Hook

That computer didn’t just run software.

It rewired how I thought.

It taught me how to:

  • Pull systems apart
  • Understand how things flow
  • Take nothing at face value
  • Build something better the next time around

There was no roadmap.
No YouTube.
No Stack Overflow.

Just curiosity, trial-and-error, and a very abused Packard Bell.

And the Rest Is Still Loading…

That moment — Christmas 1993 — launched everything.

A 25-year career.
Countless projects.
A lifetime of obsession with systems, storytelling, and machines that do more than they’re told.

This blog exists because of that computer.

Everything I build traces back to that machine.

Welcome to the origin of the pipeline.