My first Computer
I Got my first PC for a Xmas present when I was 12 years old, back in 1992. The only thing I knew about computers was that you could play videogames on it.
To be honest, I do not recall the exact model but it was an assembled 486 IBM PC Compatible, with a few megs of ram, a VGA display, both 5 1/4″ & 3 1/2″ floppy drives, the basic mouse & keyboard, and a Star NX100 parallel printer, running on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.
About a couple of years later, it was upgraded to an Intel 486 DX4 – 100 Mhz with the Math Coprocessor, that was a big speed improvement, more RAM, a bigger Hard Drive, a 512KB Video Graphics card, the brand new Sound Blaster 16 Audio card, finally I heard something better than just “beep’s”, and a cutting edge technology CD-ROM.
“I recall being amazed of watching movie trailers in my PC, with the CD-ROM player, from those free CD’s that came with the PC Magazines.“
Due the lack of advances on the printer front, I kept the same printer for many years to come.
The Game Changer / The Internet
After I got my first modem, everything changed for me, now, I was able to finally get online. It opened a whole new world of information at the reach of my hands.
This single piece of hardware unleashed the chains that were setting me back.
It was the era of GeoCites, do you remember your first Web Site? Mine was full of crazy GIF’s, hilarious midi sounds and of course a visible “Visit Counter”, I was so proud of it.
We also had Yahoo!, the mIRC, AOL, among others, to enlist a few names, I’ll talk more about that later in my work experiences.
My First Technical Job
I started working as a Technical System Admin in 1998’s, just after I finished college and before I went to the University, in a small ISP in my city.
In the good old days, prior to broadband Internet access, we only had dial-up Internet, believe it or not that was a thing for a long time to come.
My team was in charge of the customers technical support, like setting up their dial-up connections, and the Company Web Hosting services, including the corporate email and site building. I made some really good friends in there, I’m still in touch with some of them.
Most of the issues we had with the customers were related to the fact that there was not enough phone lines for everyone, because the customer per line ratio was too high, around 30:1 or more, so you had to stay awake late at night to be able to connect to a free phone line and get online.
I still remember the sound of the modem handshake, It was a recomforting sound after it finished the process and you finally got online.
In the early days of the Internet we used the Trumpet Winsock for making the TCP/IP dial-up connection (Windows 3.1), the Netscape Navigator, and of course the world famous Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the most popular client was the mIRC, and still does.
I could probably write too many stories about mIRC, but I really wont, this particular program made a huge impact on me, you will se why.
My first Entrepreneur
Just right after I got into the University, a couple of older friends and I, based on our mIRC experiences and technical knowledge, decided to start a regional shell hosting company.
The timing was about right, we were not the first guys in the world doing this, but I’m very sure that we were the first ones doing it in Mexico with the tech support in Spanish.
The big Innovation in Shell Hosting
I saw an opportunity in the “complexity” of the Eggdrop Bot and BNC installation process, if you wanted to have them installed, you had to SSH into your account, compile it and made the install, then you had edit the config file and run it, so you had to have some shell knowledge and be able to understand all the English language documentation.
One of the partners was very good at writing PERL scripts and CGI files. So I explained to him one of my ideas, that we should have a simple Website form in our client area to install the Bots, so anyone would just type the Bot’s nick name, the #channel, then select the IRC network from a pre-loaded menu list and just clicked on the Submit button to finish the process, and we did it!
With our submit form, you were able to setup Eggdrop Bots and BNC’s without ever typing any Linux command at all. It was an instant success! later everyone in the business copied this big idea from me.
“The Eggdrop Bot, Eggdrop is a popular IRC bot and the oldest still being maintained, It was originally written by Robey Pointer in December 1993″.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop
The IP connection Solution
Another area of opportunity that I saw in our provided services, was that our IP’s were getting connections rejected due the “Too many connections for this IP” from the IRC servers. So I thought of a cleaver solution, and in this occasion I did all the Perl coding myself, in our Web Site we showed the actual number of connections per IP, so now you could choose an IP with low connections number and improve your chances of connecting to the server promptly.
Like my previous idea, after a while this became an industry standard world wide, and yeah it was all on me. It’s too bad I did not get any real credit for both ideas, but the joy that I can make things happen and I’m still proud of them, like many other innovations that I have created through my career.
I made other big improvements in the business, like pointing the vhost A records to multiple IP’s in order to prevent a DDoS attack, so it was hard to pinpoint the real IP to be attacked, an auto Domain grabber to obtain cool domain names, and the list will keep going for long but It’s already in the past.
The end of Shell Hosting / mIRC Era
Like many things in life, nothing last forever and the shell hosting business was not the exception, with the creation of the ICQ, that was also replaced by the MSN messenger, the people started to communicate in new and more direct ways.
Also the IRC servers started to hide the real IP, due the amount of DDoS, and with that the vanity vhosts too, so the use of the BNC’s was not a thing anymore. We had such a good time and I feel great that I was part of it.
This business help me to pay some of my University expenses, but a more important thing is that it gave me a lot of experience as a Remote Linux & Unix System Admin, even before I got my bachelor degree.
The story continues on the Next Page.
