Episode: 3663
Title: HPR3663: How I got into Tech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3663/hpr3663.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:59:51

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3663 for Wednesday the 17th of August 2022.
Today's show is entitled, How I Got Into Tech.
It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech.
It is hosted by Stack of F. It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Follow Up Episode About How I Got Into Tech.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, I am Stash AF, and I am once again your host.
When I recorded and uploaded my introductory episode, I realized that I failed to bore
all of you with how I got into tech in the first place.
Let me start by setting my own personal way back machine, which probably doesn't go
as far back as some of yours, to when I was in 8th grade.
This was when I had my first computer, as opposed to the family computer, which everyone
in the house could use.
This one was in my bedroom, nobody else could use it.
Set the stage at that time, my family only had dial up, and it was only used to download
email and only on the family computer.
There was no web browsing in our house, because that cost money, and the email was free.
So despite me being the only person who used this computer, and not web surfing or downloading
emails, and not really playing games either other than solitaire, I was rapidly running out
of storage space.
I don't remember exactly how big the hard drive was, but this was Windows 95, so it couldn't
have been much.
It was definitely smaller than the family computer, which had a whopping 1.5 gigs.
Anyway, in an effort to free up storage space, I started compressing and then eventually
deleting files that I didn't use.
Somehow I'd managed to find my way into the Windows directory, and saw a huge file called
command.com and thought, wow, this will free up all kinds of space, and promptly deleted
it.
And yes, the next time I tried turning my computer on, it didn't want to.
Ahuka, if you're listening, I've learned my lesson on that one.
After that, I took my computer to one of my uncles to fix, because that's what he did
for a living.
In addition to reinstalling Windows, he added another hard drive, so I wouldn't repeat
the stupidity of what I'd done in the first place.
But he also showed me the inside of my computer.
And this is where the interest started.
He started by walking me through the different parts and gave me the basics of what everything
did.
He then took an ethernet card out of one of his other computers and installed it in mine,
so he could access his internet that he had at his house to download a few school-related
educational programs that I needed for the upcoming year.
He also gave me a PCI-TV tuner card that he just happened to have lying around, but
he didn't install it.
He said what he did was he told me that if I ever wanted to, I could install it myself,
and then it would go in just like the ethernet card had.
I will come back to this later.
So now we move on to my sophomore year in high school.
Front of mine gave me his old TI-85 graphing calculator because he didn't need it anymore.
Apparently, it wasn't good enough for the calculus class he was taking, but it was just
fine for my lowly little algebra two class.
On it, he had written a basic if then script.
I saw it, ran it a few times to see what it did, and then decided to open it to see how
it worked.
After that, I elaborated on it, made it bigger, more complex, adding else's and other
conditionals.
The following year, I started writing my own scripts on my graphing calculator that
not only would do math functions for me, but would also show me the work.
Some people said that what I was doing was cheating, but I was using this as a way
to actually learn how the formulas worked and to reinforce them for myself.
Finally, I realized that I was just having way too much fun writing these basic scripts,
and so my senior year, I had dropped out of math and science and took computer programming
in C++.
This is also when I had mustard up the courage to install the TV tuner card I had mentioned
earlier.
I say mustard up the courage because I didn't want to break my computer again, but it went
incorrectly.
I got the drivers installed, the software, and it worked.
So now I'm able to watch TV on my desktop, and I was so proud of myself because at the
time, my parents had taken away the TV that I had in my room for my being a child and
doing childish things related reasons.
But I had installed the card, so I was able to watch TV at my own leisure.
After I graduated high school, I went to a trade school and got a degree in network technology,
learning the basics of Linux, the macOS at the time, Cisco, etc.
And I taught myself a little visual basic along the way, so now I had exposure into two programming
languages.
After graduating, I joined the Air Force for you guessed it to be a linguist.
Unfortunately, because of life circumstances at the time, I wasn't able to keep up with
the pace of learning the language that they were actually trying to teach me.
So I failed out of that and ended up getting transferred to AirCrew, where I remained
for the rest of my time in the Air Force.
After that, I got a job fixing computers, so it ended up going full circle anyway.
Because of my dabbling with C++ and visual basic, I am currently working on teaching myself
Python, not just full Python, but also the micro and circuit varieties, so that I can use
the Raspberry Pi Pico for a few personal projects that I have going on.
If and when I get them working, I do plan on sharing them with the rest of the community.
I'm also a licensed ham radio operator, and have been since I was in the eighth grade.
I got into ham radio through my time in Boy Scouts, and because of ham radio, I became
an eagle scout.
Scouting definitely gave me the outdoor time I needed to counter all of the indoor time
I was getting in front of the computer.
It also gave way to more interests, like hiking, camping, and geocaching.
All of this has definitely made me a more rounded person, and I hope that I can share some
of who I am with the rest of the community.
Thank you for listening to my ramblings, and tune in next time.
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