In 1996, I attended a computer show called VIEX, the Vancouver Island Expo in Victoria, BC. I was 13 years old. My Dad dropped me off at the venue, had a quick walk around himself to look at the neat gadgets, and then left me there for the rest of the day with instructions to call him when I wanted to be picked up. My Dad was always supportive of my interest in computers, and did what he could to encourage it.
VIEX was pivotal for me in so many ways, but it’s really where my career in software started. I had been hacking on various computers since the tender age of eight, and developing software. I had a weird fascination with what we used to call “business software.” While the other kids were making games (I did that, too) in BASIC, I was writing PIMs, scheduling software, accounting tools, and various other utilities that I thought would improve life.
The largest booth at the Expo was at the front door, operated by Shaw Cable. They were demonstrating The Wave, which was their cable internet offering. I think they were offering 2mbits/sec, delivered to your home via the same cable that brought television. I was intrigued: I was lucky to have early access to internet via dialup modem, and paid accounts (courtesy of my gadget-freak father) on all of the local BBSes. But we all knew high speed internet was the future.
I walked up to one of the demo terminals, and loaded some web pages. I had recently been fiddling with GNU/Linux and knew that downloading new versions would be something I wanted to do: so I downloaded the latest Slackware on the cable internet demo computer to see how long it took. It was so fast, I missed it. I was hooked.
I walked around the Expo and looked at all of the booths. I ran into the Linux nerds, and they had a stack of burnt CDs for the taking. They were organizing “Install Fests” where you would bring your PC and all of your peripherals, and they would help you install it. I signed up to help with this immediately, and made many fast friends with similar interests.
But I kept circling back to the Shaw booth and playing with the fast internet. At one point, my friend Pavel (who I met in the computer books section at the local Chapters when we both reached for the same C++ book) showed up and we hacked together a Python script to see how much speed we could squeeze out of the internet connection.
Pavel went home, but I kept at it. I typed furiously, made progress bars (dots, let’s be honest) appear on the screen. And was amazed at the speed. Periodically, someone would walk up and ask me questions about the technology, which I happily answered when I knew the answer, and helped them look it up when I didn’t, because I wanted to know too.
At one point in the middle of the afternoon, I looked up from my furious typing, looked around, and noticed that there were twenty people standing around watching me. I felt a bit embarrassed that I was hogging the machine, and apologized and walked away to talk to the Linux nerds again. When I left, the crowd dispersed.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the crowd had gathered to watch a very young looking 13 year old boy typing 100 WPM into a computer and making it do things with the new internet connection.
Later, I circled back around to the Shaw booth and found that my favourite demo computer was available, and my programs were still there on the desktop. There wasn’t a queue, so I picked up writing programs and playing with the connection. I kept answering questions when asked. At one point, I was told that the sales guy was directing technical questions to me because he didn’t have the answers, and I seemed to enjoy answering them.
At the end of the first day of the Expo, the sales guy (who I’ll call Tim, because that’s what I remember his name being) asked me if I wanted a job. I told him “Oh, I’m not really a professional. I just like computers, and this is really fast and fun to play with.”
Tim told me that I knew more than enough, and the job would simple: wear a Shaw t-shirt, draw a crowd by playing with the computer, and answer technical questions when they came up. They would pay me $15/hr for this, for the rest of the Expo. When my Dad arrived to pick me up, Tim explained this to my Dad and asked if he could bring me back every day for the rest of the Expo.
To put this in perspective, I was 13 years old. Up to that point, my only job had been the three paper routes I kept (so I could buy computer stuff), and selling newspaper subscriptions. $15/hr, my Dad told me, was more money than I could expect to make doing literally any other job, and agreed to bring me back the next day. My adult cousins who worked in construction at the time didn’t make $15/hr.
So that was it: the next day, I came back in my Shaw t-shirt (several sizes too big, because they didn’t have children’s sizes) and played with the fastest internet connection I had ever experienced, while answering occasional technical questions. It only seemed a little weird that I was able to do this, but I felt very lucky to be getting paid to do what I would have been doing anyhow.
On the last day of the Expo, I was asked if I would prepare a “technical” demo to show just how fast the internet was compared to dial-up. Shaw had booked the main stage, but didn’t really have anything to show. I modified my Python script to run in two modes: full-speed, and throttled. And I stood on a stage, 13 years old, wearing a t-shirt made for a grown-ass man that hung to my knees, in front of 400 people describing how cable internet would change their lives.
Tim gave me my pay cheque which was more money than I’d seen in one place at a time. And asked if I would be willing to do more shows in the future. I worked a dozen Expos of all shapes and sizes all over southern Vancouver Island that year. Just a kid, getting paid a ridiculous amount of money, to play with computers.
I was in heaven.
This job was pivotal for me in an unexpected way: nobody told me that speaking in public was scary. I never learned to be afraid of speaking in front of a room full of people. It wasn’t until many years later, when I started to recognize the faces of my idols in the audience that I first felt a knot in my stomach before introducing myself.
It was many months before we qualified to have the fast internet installed in our own home. I got a discount, on account of being an employee, and my Dad (always supportive of my computering habits) was very happy to pay the monthly cost.
I remember the day the technician showed up to install The Wave. I insisted on installing the network card myself: I had deliberately bought one that I knew worked with Linux, and I didn’t let anyone else touch my computer. When the installer finished, he made me boot my computer in to Windows (which I, dutifully, referred to as Micro$oft Windoze in those days) and he installed an ancient, branded version of Netscape Navigator on my computer from a CD-ROM.
Some of you might not remember, but the mid-to-late 90s, were the middle of what we refer to as “the browser wars.” Netscape Navigator was released, and Microsoft proceeded to abuse their monopoly in Operating Systems to try and put them out of business. New browser versions were released rapidly (for the times), and the version that the technician had installed was what I considered to be a positively ancient version of Netscape Navigator with Shaw branding.
I asked the technician what the difference between Netscape Navigator and Shaw Navigator were, and why it was so old. He didn’t know, but he suggested that maybe it was because they changed the “throbber” to be a Shaw Wave icon, and that they had pressed CDs with this version included along with the network card driver for the default card they provided (which didn’t work with Linux.) He reminded me that I could use it to download whatever version I wanted, in seconds, as soon as he left.
I was offended by this. Shaw had pressed thousands of CDs with an old version of the browser, to install software on a computer that was now connected to the internet with the fastest available internet connection of the time. The only change was the throbber, and it was so old.
I wouldn’t let this go. So when the technician left, I inspected the Shaw branded Navigator and compared it to the version of Netscape Navigator it was based on. I realized quickly that indeed the only difference was the throbber, and that it was easy to replace the throbber with a custom image.
I spent several frantic days writing a program in Visual Basic to put the Shaw Wave throbber in the latest version of Netscape Navigator. I could then replicate the Shaw Wave browser in the latest version of Navigator. I decided that I should do the same for Internet Explorer (obviously I called this Internet Exploder.)
After a few days, I had a small Visual Basic program which would ask you which browser you wanted, download it, install it, and replace the throbber with the Shaw Wave version. In less than a minute, from the comfort of your amazingly fast internet connection.
I had an idea for a complete product: my goal was to put this program on a floppy disk, along with the network card driver. A technician could then install the network card driver, and then run my program which would grab the latest version of the browser. No CD needed. No old-ass version of a web browser for your fancy new internet connection.
I was excited. I showed this to Tim at the next Expo. He was impressed. He asked me “Do you know how much it costs to press a CD?” I did not. I don’t know if he did, either, but he knew they had to order many thousands of them on a long lead time. And you couldn’t fit a network card driver and a web browser on a single floppy disk.
A few days later I was asked to go to the Shaw office in Victoria and demo this thing that I had built for some technicians. So I took the bus to the office with a stack of floppy disks, and showed them what I had built. I brought the documentation I had written, and the source code in case they had a real programmer there to tell me what I had done wrong.
Tim’s boss was there in the meeting. He was impressed, too. He knew how much it cost to press CDs. With it, they could use the speed of the new internet connection to install the branded browser, and avoid the cost of pressing CDs. In those days, all computers still had floppy disk drives, and not all had CD-ROM drives, so the floppy-based solution was superior in multiple ways.
Tim’s boss asked me how much money I wanted for my software. I wasn’t expecting them to buy it: I thought I had just done a cool thing that would make their lives easier. But I could tell that this was valuable. I really wanted a Pentium upgrade for my computer, so I told him the largest number I could think of, expecting that it was ridiculous. I told him I wanted a thousand dollars. Tim’s boss didn’t even blink. He said “No problem. It’s ours now.”
I didn’t realize it until many years later, I probably could have charged way more for this software. By at least an order of magnitude or more. Pressing CDs cost more than $2 per at the time, the lead time was long, and there were minimum order requirements. A thousand dollars to some barely pubescent kid to eliminate the next round of CD pressing was a bargain.
I gave Tim’s boss the floppy disk with the Visual Basic source code, a printout of the documentation I had written, and was instructed to delete any copies I had of it when I got home. There wasn’t a contract: I was 13, I couldn’t sign one. But I was an employee, so they would just add it to my next pay cheque.
When my next pay cheque arrived, I had enough money to upgrade to a Pentium 90 with 32MB of RAM and a harddrive with more than a gigabyte of storage.
More importantly, I was now a real software developer. I was already living out my career ambitions, and I couldn’t even drive a car yet.
For Xmas that year, my Dad bought me Symantec C++. Someone at his work told him that I had to learn C++ in order to be a “real programmer,” and that Symantec C++ was his favourite compiler suite. So my Dad bought it for me, and printed the manuals at his work during lunch breaks.
My parents had a massive fight over it that Xmas. Symantec C++ cost almost a thousand dollars, and my mum was furious that my Dad would spend that much money so that I could spend even more time “playing with computers.” This was a common refrain in my house: my Dad encouraged me to explore technology and learn about computers. My mum wanted me to focus on getting what she considered to be a “real job.”
I continued getting programming and technical jobs of all sorts after that. It really was the start of my career. By the time I was old enough to drive, I was working full-time hours doing programming and technical jobs. My school work suffered as a result, but it didn’t matter to me, I was going to be a real programmer.
That experience taught me a few things that are still with me today. Most of my quarter-century career has been spent working from home in various capacities. I never learned that you had to go into an office every day in order to get paid to develop software, and I always found it weird when companies insisted on you keeping their chairs warmed in addition to developing software.
The work in the exhibitions taught me that talking in front of a room full of people just wasn’t that big of a deal, that it was part of the job, and nothing to be concerned about.
It also taught me that a small drive to solve problems that exist is an entrepreneurial skill that is hard to teach.
I guess you could say that in a small way, I started my career as an exhibitionist.