by Linux Admin Geeks
This is the story of How did I become a System Administrator, I hope that you find it inspiring if you are looking into this passionate career. If you are a Linux Admin Geek, maybe you have a similar story to share.
The Introduction
I was born in the summer of 1980. My first computer encounter was at my father’s private office at home, he had in the early 80’s, and still does, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, it was plugged to a black and white TV, with the original two set game controllers, the matrix printer, the diskette drive, and a couple of video games.
We had a great time playing games on it, but that was pretty much I knew about computers. I was too young to really understand and appreciate the computers full potential.
On a side note about the gaming and me, until this day, I only play eventually cooperative games with the friends, because I rather spent my free time with my family, learning new stuff or fixing something at home.
But that’s just me, If you make yourself a living out of gaming, then it works for you.
The Romance
The tech romance started when I was a child, with a family travel to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Like any child, I loved Mickey Mouse, but I was more fascinated of all the animatronics and the technology that was involved in the parks and rides, even to this day.
I remember to be amazed at Disney’s Epcot Center futuristic vision of the world. I keep a vivid image of a room inside Epcot, the CommuniCore’s Computer Central, that had touch screen computers were you could use your fingers to navigate through the menus and learn a lot of things about the world. That was a pretty amazing innovation.
Also they had some kind of a display circle with telephones and in the middle of it there was a robot (SMRT-1) that could speak, the way it worked was that, you had to pick up the phone, press a button and made a question to the robot through the phone and it answered back to you!
It was the early stage of the voice recognition software. For a child it appeared that it was a smart talking robot, a dream come true.
Another great child memory was the cars prototypes exhibition, I’m still waiting for the flying cars that they said we would have in the year 2000, not really.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like Epcot Center at the present, but it feels like it has been left behind, it’s no longer a vision of the future, but the past. Now, in the 2021, WDW is doing major renovations to Epcot Center, I hope it gets back that shocking experience of a futuristic vision of the world.
The Influences
Besides my father, the next big influence that made me get interested into computer science was one of my older cousins, he’s four years older and his family lives in another state, my brother and I used to visit them in the summer breaks, we had really a good time.
My cousin always had top of the line computer equipment and knew a few tricks about them, he let us play games on his computer and taught us a lot of the stuff that you could do with the computer, like playing music, watching videos or writing your own code.
When I was about 16 years old, he gave me a book of Pascal Language and I started to like all about programming languages. After he finished college, he started a bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering and we got even more topics to talk about.
At last but not least on my list, I can’t left behind my first computer tutor, it was the early 90’s and through the pc games he made me learn everything about MS-DOS, the Configsys and Autoexec.bat, I remember that you had to load all drivers, like video, sound card and CD-Rom to the extended memory (HIMEM) in order to free the conventional memory and be able to load and play games.
My very first IT Job
My tutor, later my friend, hooked me up on his work place in the ‘95, when I was only 15 years old. The place was a small computer store, just a few blocks away from my home, in there I learned about hardware repairs and PC assembling, the process has not changed a bit in 25 years.
In the early Internet days, we did not have YouTube video guides or Google step by step tutorials, there was the Altavista Search site, AOL, and Yahoo, but not everything was available online, most of the world technical knowledge was still on books and if you wanted to learn something new you had to read it from a book or to ask to someone wiser your questions, chances were that even they did not know the answer, then you had to figure it out yourself.
The story continues on the Next Page.