The guy sitting next to me thought he was talking to a girl on mIRC.
He was talking to me. I was eight.
This was Warpnet, a sală de net in Suceava, around 1999. We had CRT monitors connected to the outside world, nicknames to hide behind, and apparently neither the need nor the situational awareness to check the next chair over.
Practically every conversation on Undernet started with asl pls. Age, sex, location, please. A tiny three-part questionnaire, which I had decided to treat as creative writing.
The location part, at least, turned out to be extremely accurate.
When he realised who was typing back, his reaction amounted to: bro, what the fuck.
Fair enough. I think about that afternoon whenever I catch myself taking my beginnings in computing too seriously.
What a nickname gave you
A nickname gave you room. You could ask a stupid question without wearing it for the rest of the school year, try on a different personality, or join a room full of adults who treated you like a peer until proven otherwise. Sometimes you used that freedom to be an idiot. Exhibit A: me, age eight.
Still, there was something genuinely valuable in getting to choose how much of yourself to bring into a conversation. Today it feels like half the web is a machine for gluing your real name, your face, your phone number, and your browsing history onto every stray thought you have online. A puzzle you never agreed to sit for. I think we lost something real when we traded handles for profiles.
Romania had come out of communism in December 1989. Ten years later, there I was in Suceava, opening mIRC and joining channels on an international network. Someone in another country could answer me. So could someone within elbow distance. The same little grey window handled both.
The size of that shift makes more sense to me as an adult. Back then, typing a line and seeing a stranger answer was enough to hold my whole attention. My words had appeared on their screen. They'd read them, typed something back, and now it was on mine. I could make that happen whenever I wanted.
What else could I make happen?
That question could eat an entire afternoon.
First contact with the Unix shell
I learned Unix there, at Warpnet, through the older regulars in that room. They have my respect to this day. They knew things I wanted to understand, and instead of telling a kid to get lost, they pulled up a chair and showed me.
Someone showed me ls. Two letters, Enter, and the computer told me what was inside the directory. Then cd, and I could step somewhere else, run ls again, and look around a new room. I was finding my way through a machine just by typing little words at it.
Then came ssh. The keyboard under my hands was still in a noisy internet cafe in northern Romania, sticky keys and all, but the commands were running on another computer hundreds of kilometres away. Even listing files felt different once that sank in.
Learning how to start a program with ./ in front of its filename felt like being let in on a trade secret. You typed it, pressed Enter, and a process woke up. Soon enough there was Eggdrop, psyBNC, config files I barely understood, and more things to compile, break, and try again.
There was a very generous gap between what I could run and what I could explain. Being eight, I saw no reason to let that affect my confidence.
The habit that stuck
I doubt the people teaching me thought they were deciding what I'd spend my adult life doing. They were just showing a kid some computer stuff. I was having the time of my life. Somewhere in that exchange, a fairly permanent habit formed: I still have trouble leaving a thing alone once I realise I don't understand how it works.
That can make me difficult to work with sometimes. We get a bug fixed or a feature working, normal people are happy to close the ticket and go home, and I'm still squinting at the trace wondering why that fixed it. It took me years to accept that people come to software for different reasons — for the craft, for the paycheque, or just to get the job done and go outside — and that my obsession doesn't create an obligation for anyone else to share it. I know that now. Occasionally I still have to remind my face.
You can probably see how I ended up building a personal website that looks like a terminal, or why I ended up turning those 1999 Suceava memories into a playable winter game. Give me a blinking cursor, a quiet night, and something I can poke at, and I settle right in. Every so often, something works and I still get that exact same urge to turn to the next chair: look at this.
I couldn't tell you every command I learned at Warpnet. I can still picture the guy next to me discovering who he'd been chatting with. I remember the people who took the time to explain Linux to an eight-year-old. And I recognise the kid who always had one more thing to try before his hour ran out.
Steve Jobs called the computer “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
For me, it's food for my soul.
Anyway, my back hurts now. I'm going to lie down.
Stay fucking curious. The magic of computers is still very real.