The first computer I ever had nearly endless access to was a Macintosh Performa 6200 my grandparents bought circa 1996. By 1998 my grandpa had a hand-me-down Hewlett-Packard while I had a pretty new Compaq PC, and the old Mac was in and out of service as a project computer.
By 2012 I had acquired numerous computer components and systems, both desktops and laptops. After years of playing with Linux, I finally made the leap to power user as I was also becoming a professional journalist. My roommate and I had a makeshift fileserver set up in the laundry room of his trailer and we wired the whole place with ethernet cables.
It wasn’t until 2016 that I started messing more with headless systems thanks to a hand-me-down Raspberry Pi and word of Tvheadend while in Cleveland, Ohio, which gave our household access to over two-dozen channels with a single antenna. I recorded hours of Walker: Texas Ranger and the Summer of Space programming on WVIZ Ideastream (the local PBS station).
A quarter of a century after Power Pete and Thinkin’ Things on that Macintosh from Sears, I’m running multiple services for my entire family on a refurbished piece of enterprise equipment, from a Minecraft server to photo management software. As a teenager first learning about X Drive, I couldn’t have imagined hosting a cloud service from my home office closet.
But here I am, sharing my thoughts on all of this on my own little corner of the web (albeit not ALL of it on my home network for obvious security reasons). A dork from Alabama that got excited by a Polaroid camera and a scanner can now stream high-definition video on a secure website without relying on any paid service beyond my monthly internet connectivity bill and an annual VPS bill.
The amount of money I’ve put into the equipment is laughably low. At least four systems came from my late step-grandfather and one remains in use (another expired in 2020 when work from home became a thing); two of the most powerful machines I’ve ever owned were refurbished and purchased for a combined total of $600.
My contribution to the open source community has been nonexistant, but my use of it has been pivotal in helping me confidently navigate the digital age. Thank you to the people that make up the open source community.
