Tis the year 2000, it’s summer and also Friday. To put it into context, i’m 10 years old and sharing my dad’s computer with my sister, who’s in high school. My dad bought this particular computer because the old one was from the stone age and he need it for work, my sister for the school projects and then there’s me, hehe. Some paint, some small texts, but mostly gaming.

I really did have a hard time trying to get my turn to use the computer, but when i did i was the happiest kid alive. I had a strict curfew regarding my computer usage, but i made the best with what little time i had.

Remember the year 2000? Everybody was running on x86, computer cases were mostly white and the rich and famous ran Windows 2000 and had 80 gig hard drives and at least 256 megs of ram. At the writing of this article the computers i’m talking about might sound like this hardware is from last century, but those were the days, and i miss those days.

My dad worked in construction so he used the computer to make building estimates and so forth. He was actually one of the few to actually own and actually use a computer in construction on a day by day basis. He had lots of text and 3d files, building plans, years of work, all stored on one hard drive of just 20 gigs. Remember this part, i’ll get to it later in the story.

So getting back to the story, it’s Friday and my mom just woke me up and told me that my cousin just arrived into town and is spending the weekend. My cousin, who was a med student at the time, always had cool hardware, the newest games. He was like that cool guy in school that you would look to from the other side of the street and say “whoooaaa..”. So…i couldn’t miss this opportunity, packed some clothes and asked my dad to take me to my aunts house.

Some talk about the weather, family stuff and a few hours later my cousin took my to his room. I still remember looking at that CRT monitor, full of sticky notes powering on and showing the operating system booting. He said that he’ll leave me here, i have the icons on the desktop, food is on the table and the bed is ready for when i’ll be too tired. WOW! A dream, a real dream, that’s what it was.

The weekend was almost over, it’s Sunday. He had to go, he lived in another city and he had to pack his computer. I was fine with it, hell, i just spent the whole weekend playing games, what was i to say? Hehe While he was packing i saw some cds on the table and started to browse them. They where pirated copies of course. A few cd’s caught my attention, they had the same writing on them but different numbers. It said Red Hat Linux, cd1, cd 2…and so forth. I was like, “hmmm, i didn’t see this game installed, what is it?“. I eventually got the cds from my cousin, i was so happy, he tried explaining some “stuff” to me but i didn’t care. I eventually found out why he continued to laugh, even after i got the discs in my possession.

Fast forward some months, i eventually found myself at home, my parents where away and my big sister was looking after me. She was busy with studying in her room and i saw an opportunity. I splinter celled my way and started the computer. With the discs in the drive nothing was happening, i kept on swapping them, but still nothing. I got angry and manually restarted the computer using the button from the computer case. At some point i tried again with the first cd but still nothing was happening on the desktop. Of course i restarted the computer, again. While all hope was lost, i looked up and saw that something was happening, colors, writing, a bar was loading. I was amazed while looking at that CRT monitor, that black background, all that text appearing and going up and disappearing, i felt like i was in some hacker movie. The computer started booting from the cd.

I eventually ended up clicking and choosing stuff that i could understand and of course i also tried every combination possible of clicks in order to advance. After some next, next, click, finish i waited for that last bar to load and get to 100%. I restarted the computer again, manually, but that windows logo never came, and at that moment, he knew, he fucked up!

That game, that sounded so awesome was something else. It was not a game, it was like windows, it was an operating system. To be fair, i knew that next next finish lead to an installation, but it turned out that the text i didn’t understand while clicking actually meant something.

As you’ve might have guessed, i erased everything, my sisters school stuff and all of my dad’s projects. Cool, huh?

The computer was fixed at some point that summer, and guess who didn’t have access to it? Yeah, it was a lame summer. The good thing is that i eventually ended buying books that summer, yeah, i was still curious about that thing that was like windows, but not windows. Yeah, i actually became quite a computer bookworm after that incident. The picture was becoming so much clear!

I finally understood why my cousin kept laughing that day…