First Boot

1999–2004 · Memory · Silicon Scribbles 001

I don't remember the first computer I touched. I remember wanting to touch all of them.

That is probably a more accurate beginning anyway, because there was never one dramatic moment where a screen lit up and I somehow knew technology would become part of my life. No revelation, no tiny version of me deciding that one day I would spend far too much time around software, systems and machines. I was simply a kid who liked pressing things, opening menus I did not understand and touching settings I probably had no business touching.

If something had a screen, I wanted to know what happened when I interacted with it.

I also happened to grow up at a pretty good time to have that problem. Computers still looked unmistakably like computers then. They were large, loud, grey and unapologetically mechanical. Monitors had depth, keyboards had weight, fans were audible and laptop hinges looked like they had been engineered with the expectation that the machine might eventually be passed down through generations.

Turning one on felt like an event. You pressed the button, something clicked, something hummed, the screen woke up and then you waited.

I don't miss the waiting.

I do miss the feeling that something was happening.

Before the computer, there was a Siemens

One of my earliest memories of technology isn't a computer at all. It is my dad's Siemens A35.

It was a small grey phone with a tiny monochrome screen and rubber buttons, and by today's standards there was almost nothing you could actually do with it. You could make a call, send a message, scroll through a few menus, change a ringtone and probably spend much longer than necessary staring at the battery icon.

That was more or less the entire universe, and I thought it was incredible.

It belonged to my dad, which naturally made it even more interesting. Whenever he put it down, I wanted it. I couldn't tell you what I was trying to accomplish once I got hold of it, and I doubt I knew either. There was no grand objective. I just liked pressing things and seeing what changed.

There is something funny about remembering a phone like that now. The device in my pocket today can navigate across countries, shoot high-resolution video, translate languages, access most of human knowledge and perform more computing in a few seconds than that little Siemens could dream of.

None of that would have mattered to the kid holding it.

The screen lit up. I pressed something. Something happened.

That was enough.

9,999 games. Apparently.

Then came the brick game.

If you grew up around that era, you probably already know the exact type without needing a photograph. It was the usual grey plastic rectangle with a tiny LCD, buttons loud enough to announce every move and packaging that made an absolutely fearless claim somewhere along the lines of 9999 IN 1.

There were not 9,999 games.

There may not even have been nine.

There was Tetris, Snake, something vaguely involving cars, and then several increasingly suspicious versions of Tetris pretending to be different games. Sometimes the blocks fell faster. Sometimes they started higher. Sometimes the layout changed just enough to convince you for a few minutes that this was definitely a new game.

None of that mattered because, unlike most of the other technology around me at the time, this one was mine.

I did not have to wait for somebody else to finish using it. I did not have to ask permission. There was no account, no update, no internet connection and certainly no notification interrupting the game to tell me about a premium subscription.

It just worked.

You put batteries in, switched it on and disappeared into that tiny screen for as long as you could get away with. I would carry it from one room to another even when there was absolutely no reason to move it. Lose a game, restart, lose again, restart again.

That was the whole system.

And it was brilliant.

Then there was the Toshiba

This one is different because, unlike most things from that period, I still have it.

An old Toshiba laptop from somewhere around that era is still sitting with me more than two decades later. I wish I could tell you the exact model, but I genuinely cannot. Whatever sticker once carried the useful information has been worn down badly enough that the model number has essentially been erased by time.

That has turned identifying it into its own ridiculous little investigation.

Every now and then I end up online looking through old Toshiba Satellites, not really reading specifications anymore but studying evidence. Hinges, speaker placement, keyboard layouts, ports, trackpads, chassis shapes and random photographs from old listings taken at angles that are completely useless for anyone actually trying to identify the machine.

I will find one and think, that might actually be it.

Then I notice a port is in the wrong place.

Case reopened.

At this point I feel less like the owner of an old laptop and more like a detective working an extremely low-stakes cold case.

The machine itself has aged exactly how you would expect. It is scratched, boxy and heavier than anything we would casually call portable today. Old laptops did not seem particularly interested in elegance. They felt more like equipment, as though opening the lid meant you were about to operate something rather than casually check a browser.

You do not pick this thing up with two fingers.

You respect the wrist.

Somewhere inside that machine is also one very important piece of software: Road Rash.

Still installed, or at least it was the last time the Toshiba could power on.

That alone is reason enough for me to bring it back.

Road Rash was beautifully ridiculous. Motorcycles, fighting, chains, kicking another rider off a bike while travelling at speeds where neither person involved should realistically have been thinking about hand-to-hand combat.

And yet there I was, completely committed to winning.

There may also have been certain end-of-race motivations involved.

People who played the game know.

We will leave that there.

The Toshiba has not booted in years. Its battery is finished, and replacing it should be the easiest part of this whole story, except of course I do not know exactly which Toshiba I own.

So now I am shopping backwards through the internet.

Instead of typing in a model number and ordering a replacement, I find myself digging through old e-commerce listings, comparing part numbers, voltage ratings, connector positions, battery dimensions and stock being sold for machines that were built when broadband still felt impressive.

Modern online shopping has made almost everything absurdly convenient. Search, compare, order, track and wait for a package to arrive.

Meanwhile I am sitting in the middle of all that convenience, zooming into a blurry photograph of a twenty-year-old battery and wondering whether the little plastic groove on the left matches mine.

Every so often I find one that looks promising. The voltage matches. The contacts look right. The description lists several Toshiba families that appear suspiciously close to mine.

For a few minutes I convince myself that this could finally be it.

Then another listing appears. Then another tab opens. Then another.

Before long, I am comparing ancient laptop batteries with the seriousness of someone working on critical infrastructure.

So the Toshiba waits.

It is still here, still unidentified and still refusing to make this easy.

Oddly enough, I like that.

Most technology from childhood disappears quietly. It gets thrown away, recycled, lost during a move or replaced so completely that one day you realize you have not thought about it in fifteen years.

This one stayed.

One day I will figure out exactly what battery it needs, or enough about the machine to power it properly another way. And when that Toshiba logo appears on the screen again, I already know what I am going to do.

I am not checking the files. I am not inspecting the operating system. I am not benchmarking anything.

I am opening Road Rash.

Some priorities survive upgrades.

The computer lab

The computer lab was different.

That might be where messing around with machines stopped being something I occasionally did and became a habit.

There was something about a room full of computers that felt important when you were young. Rows of monitors, rows of chairs, that low hum of several machines running at once and the slightly warm electronics smell computer rooms somehow always seemed to have.

Usually there was also a teacher who wanted everybody to perform one very specific task while half the class was far more interested in discovering what every other button did.

I was interested in the other buttons.

Computer time was limited, which made it valuable. You sat down knowing that somebody was eventually going to tell you your time was up, so there was always this quiet urgency to explore as much as you could.

Open something. Click around. Go back. Try another menu. Pretend none of that had happened when someone walked past.

The internet made the whole experience even stranger.

Today, pages appear so quickly that we barely register them arriving. Back then, a webpage had an entrance. You requested it and then waited while the computer appeared to consider whether your request deserved to be fulfilled.

Text might appear first. Then an image would slowly reveal itself from the top down, line by line, as though the computer was drawing it specifically for you.

Downloads were not casual decisions either. They were commitments. You could start one and genuinely wonder whether your computer session would end before the file arrived.

And when something froze, there was always that brief moment of terror.

You clicked once. Nothing happened.

You clicked again.

Still nothing.

The cursor stopped responding, the window refused to move and for several seconds you became convinced you had somehow destroyed the entire computer.

Not crashed a program.

Destroyed the computer.

School property.

Your parents were definitely going to hear about this.

Then the machine responded, the program recovered and nobody noticed anything.

So naturally, you clicked something else.

What kept pulling me in was not that I understood computers. It was the opposite.

There were folders I had never opened, settings nobody had explained, strange keys on the keyboard I had never seen anyone press and ports at the back of the machine that clearly existed for reasons beyond my understanding.

Computers always seemed to contain more computer than I was being shown.

I wanted the rest.

Somewhere along the way, the machines changed

Looking backwards makes all of this appear much more organised than it actually was.

The Siemens. The brick game. The Toshiba. The computer lab. Then computers, the internet, code and eventually systems.

Arranged neatly like that, it starts to look suspiciously like a plan.

It was not.

I was not sitting in a computer lab thinking about a future career. I was not holding my dad's phone thinking about mobile computing, and Road Rash was certainly not teaching me anything useful.

I was a kid.

Computers were cool. Games were fun. Buttons needed pressing.

That was enough.

The serious part came later.

Technology becomes less mysterious when people start paying you to understand it. Eventually there are deadlines, databases, networks, production systems, architecture diagrams, security concerns, clients, logs and backups you really hope are working.

At some point you stop being the kid asking what the machine is doing and become the person everybody looks at when the machine starts doing something weird.

That is adulthood, I suppose.

The interesting part is that the original question never really disappeared. It just became more complicated.

What does that do?

Why did this fail?

What is happening underneath this?

Can these systems talk to each other?

Could this be faster?

Could I build one?

What happens if I change this?

And sometimes, after all the years and all the extra knowledge, the question is still exactly the same:

What happens if I press the button?

That is still the good part.

First boot

The machines became smaller, then thinner and eventually almost invisible.

Phones absorbed cameras, music players, maps, calculators, notebooks and half the other objects people used to carry. The internet went from somewhere you connected to into something that quietly surrounds almost everything. Software moved into cars, homes, money, work, entertainment and infrastructure, and increasingly into machines capable of making decisions of their own.

We stopped waiting minutes for pages to load.

Now two seconds feels suspicious.

Everything changed ridiculously quickly, and somewhere inside all of that I changed too. I went from poking around machines I did not understand to working with machines I am supposedly expected to understand.

Supposedly.

Because the best days still tend to begin in exactly the same place those early ones did.

There is something in front of me I do not completely understand yet, so I start poking at it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I break something. Sometimes I spend three hours discovering the problem was one ridiculous line. Sometimes the rabbit hole goes nowhere, and sometimes it becomes an idea that eventually turns into something real.

Then there are days when I find myself twenty-something years later, eighteen browser tabs deep, trying to identify an ancient Toshiba battery because Road Rash is still sitting on the machine.

Maybe that kid never really went anywhere.

The computers got faster. The screens got better. The internet stopped making that noise. The machines got thinner, the mistakes got more expensive, and I still want to know what happens when I press the button.

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