Preface.

Ramblings before i start the history part of my miserable story:

I've come to realize something over the course of my life which if i'd known it two and a half decade ago my life wouldn't have been as meaningless as it has been now. Regardless of whatever it was i realized i learned that the conclusion of that latter part of the first statement hurt me very deep inside somehow.

I hate selfpetty wallowing articles without any other purpose than to vent the “Woo is me” feelings of the author. Always have and always will. Though this article might look like one of those or is perceived by some as one, and i do not deny the appearance might be simular at places, it is defenately not!

Is it?

Nah. Not my style.

This article has a purpose! It is a warning! So read it! Ignore it at your risk!

The purpose is to serve as a call for caution to the generation of “those who make things do stuff the creator/inventor of those things had not intended it to be capable of”

Those who asked “Why?” rather than “How?” when they were first graders.

Those who want to know why and how and who when they’re told something.

What i mean with calling for them to be cautious?

Read all parts of the article, it's in there somewhere. (F.U.)

The people more like me would've asked another question entirely by now

“Who the hell are you to think that your calls should be heeded by that generation anyway?”

And not only is it the far more important information to be curious about, it is also one of the keys to being cautious on the internet, or indeed all of life… which, for some of us, are the same thing.

Consideration of the now, that lead to my thinking about the then that lead to this now:

I am, at this moment, nobody.

This is not metaphorically meant or spiritually zen crappy oogady boogady, though i suppose to some it might sound like it.

I mean that quite literally.

I am poor, unemployed, achievementless, ambitionless and if i go today i haven't left anything significant behind in my life

I certainly didn’t make a lasting mark on this world or on any of its people.

If i hadn't existed the only loss the Earth and it's population would suffer would be my son never having been born.

I grant that that might be the greatest loss humanity would have ever suffered through but at this particular point there is very little from which the world would be able to surmise my son's future irreplacable and profound role in human history.

I can understand that Covid-19 and all the other shit going on today, flowing from 2020 into 2021 like sludge from a busted sceptic tank makes it hard to imagine an unknown kid from nowhere will be the single point in human history future generations will reference as the devider between the age before and the age after.

But eventually you will, it’s inescapable.

But that’s irrelevant to this article and the rambling rant i’m babbling on about right now!

Focus!!

Dammit!

I was saying i was nobody, have achieved nothing, acomplished nothing and might as well have not existed at all!

(FEEL SORRY FOR ME DAMMIT!!!

oh, wait, no, don’t…

That’s the point,

everyone else that sais that wants you to, but i don’t.

Yeah.. that’s it..)

I am even worse than a nobody that didn’t achieve anything.…

I have had so much opportunities, resources, support, contacts, chances, second and third chances, options and choices in my life, everything that can make a person’s life more likely to become legendary and result in that person to become someone of the likes of Gates, Musk, Bazos, Jobs or any of those top 1% of the human population that make a big difference to all of humanity were mine for the taking during my early life. It was so ridiculously much that i had to fuck shit up in my life so badly it looked as if i consciously, willfully did it to avoid it all.

But i never allowed any of them to just take me along the flow to success, fame or riches no matter how easy it would've been to do so.

The story of my life:

The beginning:

I was born in 1974, interrupting a life that wasn't that different from what mine would become at this point.

My single mother had no interest in being a mother at the time she became one and wanted to put me up for adoption like she had my half-sister two or three years earlier.

She had it all but arranged and setup but she was forced to have the baby by her parents (my grandparents).

Two awesome people with nothing but love and goodness in their hearts who couldn't bare the thought of my mother's second baby being given up for adoption as well, never to hear or see their grandchild ever again.

Very soon after i was born it was obvious it, nor i, were enough to shock my mother into living a life in which becoming a good (or even just okay) mother was a possibility.

When this became clear to them, my grandparents took me from my mother, and from that point on they raised me as their own son.

An ex Corps Commando Trooper, volentarily served two tours in the Korean war, born in 1927 and his wife, a farmer’s daughter born in 1932. A couple who had by that time already raised three daughters and were closer to the age of 50 than they were to 40.

Those two people decided to take a two year old kid into their home and raise it as their own son. Never once complained (until i was 18 years old that is) and were never going to give me anything but love, life and happiness.

Now my grandparents were not rich by any definition that i don't agree with, but they had considerably more wealth than anyone else that lived in our neighbourhood.

We always had more wealth than any of the other parents of the kids i went to school with. In fact there were very few people i knew back then that were “richer” than we were.

So it felt like we were shitfaced filthy rich to me most of my youth. Ofcourse i didn’t give that any thought back then or notice it at first. I was the first kid under 8 that had his own personal computer in the whole damned city as far as i know.

The only other person i knew had a computer was the 16 year old savant-ish guy who was my friend for the only reason he lived 50 meters from where i lived and his mother was the same age as mine (i call my grandmother my mother, get used to it!).

What lead to the Computer thing.

Every now and then i went over to his place and he showed off his computer (vic20) and the crack-intro’s he made.

Him having a Commodore Vic20 was the only reason, at first, i asked my parents to get me one of those Commodore things too, and ofcourse mine had to be better than his. And ofcourse i got what i wanted, a Commodore 16. This C16 was replaced a week later when the distributor for Commodore in the Benelux received a shipment of Commodore 64’s which were scheduled for release 3 weeks later.

I had convinced my parents that i needed that C64 by conguring up the examples from the C16’s manual's last chapters, telling them i had programmed it myself (instead of copying the BASIC source code by typing it into the interpreter character by character).

The computer thing: Commodore 64.

In the end it was that C64 that became my pride and joy, my reason for being, my slave, my master, my life and my very self. It didn’t change my life, it erased what was my life before and it became my life.

The hurdle of every single bit of information available back then being in English, which i (aged 8) didn't speak nor read, was easily conquered somehow. It was conquered in such a short time that i never managed to remember how short it was, or what i did to achieve it.

However i did it, i managed to learn how the computer worked, how its os worked (If you can call it an OS by the definitions of today, which is another discussion entirely) and i even had Assembler coding down to an artfull science pretty quickly! This was, to me, an absolute necessity, as the only other computer user i knew was one of the earliest crack-scene pioneers (the scene that now lives on in the demoscene. Google it)

The first predesessors of the computer clubs that would soon spawn what would become an actual scene and maybe even a culture began to pop up at that time and ofcourse i had the fortunate opertunity to be able to attend the first meetings!

There my one person social circle of crack sceners could possibly have been replaced by lawabiding, university students and professors exchanging ideas and coöperated on programming and innovations.

Starting in the wrong direction.

YEAH RIGHT! I didn’t hear of any groups remotely like that until i was 15 or 16 years old! The gathering of geeky nerdz that got together once a month at one of the churches nearby was where computer freaks or computer enthousiasts became crackers who came together at that church one Saturday each month, bringing their computers with them to copy every tape or disk they didn’t have yet from someone there and to go do stuff together with their computers.

Preferably stuff that some said couldn’t be done, the companies and designers said shouldn’t be done, or most awesomely (to us) do stuff which the manufacturers said the hardware wasn’t capable of. 

So ofcourse i joined the scene that was made up of guys that wanted to try every single bit of software that came out for our computers, but couldn’t afford (read didn’t want to ask their parents for) ƒ50,-- to go buy each release. We even wanted to have the software that didn’t get released in Europe or the US, but only in Japan or Korea, and we made sure we got it too!

We were the people who knew assembler and had fun taking up the challenge of removing any form of copyright protection from any new software that was realeased (even software we knew nothing about and certainly never would use).

From community center hobby gatherings to "the scene"

We had to then place a nifty little 'demo' or 'intro' in the 'executable' of that cracked software (which would then go on to start the software proparly without it's copy protection engaged) to let everyone know it was us who had cracked and released that software first.

At the meetings i attended the total attendance would be 5-10 people and half of them would be 'crackers' in the very very first few gatherings. But the attendance and the number of ‘sceners” teadily rose with the fall of the purchase costs of the commodore 64 and its various models.

Just before the Amiga was released the numbers had shifted to over 100 in attendance and 95 of them 'sceners' (40 crackers, 55 ‘copiers’) devolving the computer club meetings in to pirating/copyfests held once a week at the local community center where everybody copied cracks or intro’s or distributed their own cracks/intro’s or demo releases.

I lucked out at being located in the center of our ground zero of the scene i guess, becoming a part of the scene from the very early beginnings. (a quiet part though. Couldn’t risk my parents finding out how shady or even criminal what we did was. Remember; my father was an ex- commando, hardcore law-abiding yadda yadda) part of the scene.

You can probably imagine the likes with which i came into contact, befriended, allied with, allied agains, competed with and had “fitties” with as we'd call it today. We went up against Red Sector, Razor, Dutch Crack Guys, Fairlight and the likes with our local connections.

TFS (The Final Solution) was that guy that i mentioned having a computer that caused me to want one. TFS was one of the first pioneers of the scene in Brabant, at least that i knew of. He was the one who helped me get the will and drive to learn the basics and learn how to code in assembler enough for me to enjoy the rivalry and competition that came with that emerging “shadowy” side of computers.

That lead to loving the other things like gaming, hobbying, nerding and geeking (yes, HACKING) and which would eventually become the internet.

The connecting connections connected.

By the time the modems became affordable for people (as in beneath the thousands and thousands of guilders that only a company would be able to pay) i was quick to bludgeon my parent's resistance into non existence, by whining at epic levels, and manipulate them into buying me one.

It was the reason i had, and i have been told this claim is refuted by others, one of the first BBS’s running in my country which was not operated by a company or on university hardware.

I had even managed to obtain contacts, inside computer shops and dev companies, who'd often provide me with copies of newly released software days or even weeks before the official release dates. Ofcourse it was my duty to be uploading all of it onto my BBS.

End of Part 1.

Part 2 coming soon.