How Did I Get Into IT

Well. I would say, primarily because of my dad. I remember the days at home with a 14.4 baud modem, connecting to BTX. There was a time in the nineties, it felt like everyone should be on the Internet. Crazy, isn’t it?

In about 98 through to 2k, I had a very curious IT teacher. The lessons were not mandatory, but we had a computer room in school with let’s say about twenty 486 PCs. We learned some Basic and Pascal, and later HTML and JavaScript. Which isn’t a matter of course for a school to this day!

At home I also got an old affordable 386, and a box of SuSE Linux 5.2. I don’t remember me doing too much crazy stuff with it, besides what we learned at school.

End of 1999, again my dad, encouraged me to ask for an internship at a very small local ISP. I got it, and in succession was paid “to do computer stuff” for them once a week. In the summer of the following year, I started a 3 year training (a very German thing) there. After that, I was allowed to call myself a Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung.

Back in those days, Datacenters were some room in some buildings. In our case, our office was in the old kitchen of a former restaurant. Guess what, the server room was in the former cooling room. We had air conditioning with a bucket under a pipe. On hot summer weekends, one of us needed to go to the office on Sunday to empty the bucket. However. I learned so much in those three years. Not much in the associated school, where I was actually pretty average, but at work. We were four guys doing pretty much everything. Running an ISP with ISDN/modem dial-in, running web, Mail, DNS, and what not. Programming web applications with CGI/perl and php3. We automated the maintenance of our machines with perl scripts. I ran the tech support, later with a driver’s license, fixed the customer server on site. Did I mention, that we ran all of the servers and the dial in connections over a 2 Mbit/s line? Eventually, in about 2003, we managed to move everything out of the cooling room and into a real Datacenter. There were not many abstractions, or configuration management or what not. It was a time of figuring out stuff, and automating with a script where possible. 🤔 Not too different to today!

I’m still very thankful for being there at the time. Learned tons, without a very formal education. Later, I went to college and did my formal degree. But I’m very sure, most of my capabilities stem from those (initial) three years.