It probably won't surprise anyone who actually knows me that the earliest memory I vividly remember is of my first encounter with a computer. Waking up late, well past my bed time at the tender age of 4 or 5, sneaking down stairs to find my dad crouching over a small unassuming Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48k) playing Ground Force Zero. A simple game involving only the timely pushes of a single [b]omb key. The glow of the TV screen in the dark, sitting on my dad's knee and staying up late to bomb a city and land our plane.

Ground Force Zero Cassette Cover

Though he probably didn't know it at the time, it's clear to me now that the purchase of that £129 box of tricks was the wisest investment in my education my dad ever made. Over the next 7 years I would tinker with BASIC programming, read Your Sinclair, and develop a keen interest in computers.

This education was partly made possible because the Spectrum and other computers of the era were essentially built for a hobbyist market, consequently shipping with comprehensive documentation, technical manuals and a BASIC programming environment. This meant that the machine itself was not just a platform for consuming games and other Software, but an environment for learning and experimentation. A refuge for a child tired of getting shouted at for dismantling (or breaking?) toys out of a desire to unlock the secrets of their mechanisms.

Years later at about the age of 15 I obtained a copy of FreeBSD and later Slackware Linux on some Tucows CDROMS which I'd installed mostly out of curiosity. Being able to install a Unix system on your own commodity PC which just a few years earlier could only be run on incredibly expensive servers had an instant appeal. At first it felt a little like exploring a Pharaoh's tomb, decyphering the hieroglyphics ls, pwd, grep, root, vi, su, sed, awk, sh, /etc... and then learning that there is a deep and fascinating history behind it.

Shortly after though other things began to appeal; a powerful commandline, a single rooted filesystem, having a multi-user system (when Windows could barely multi-task), the technical reasons it appealed were countless, yet somehow became dwarfed by ideas far greater and more noble than the Unix philosophy.

Buried away in a previously unexplored directory somewhere under usr/share/emacs/etc I'd discovered a small series of text files that explained everything. The ideas of freedom, community, collaboration and open knowledge outlined in the GNU Manifesto and enshrined in legalese by the GNU Public License instantly struck home. I not only had in my hands a free Unix like operating system, but also the blueprints to build it and the rights to change it. I knew then that Richard Stallman the Free Software Foundation and thousands of developers had sewn enough of the right seeds to change the software industry forever.

Richard Stallman and a case of life imitating xkcd? (http://xkcd.com/225/)

1998 saw the end of my A-Levels; the start of my studies at the University of Dundee and the formal beginings of the Open Source Movement; a faction who believed largely in the pragmatics of free software but rejected the political stance associated with it.

My thesis which I hope to discuss further in future posts, is that Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the most important innovation born in computing since the silicon chip. Its applicability is global and its methods and principles are deserving of adoption elsewhere in a diversity of fields.

I hope to unravel these ideas in future posts particularly in relation to:

  • The future evolution of the Internet
  • Education and the importance of being open
  • Innovation
  • Software Design
  • Freedom & Control
  • Business