In highschool, I wrote a recursive mail rule that sent a friend of mine millions of messages as a joke. I (accidentally!) repeatedly crashed the school’s mail server.
The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.
In a recent episode of This American Life, an episode focused on birders, guest Noah Strycker explains the term “spark bird”:
Turkey vultures are what I would call my spark bird. For a birder, a spark bird is the one you see, usually in some kind of unexpected situation, that grabs you in a way that you haven’t been grabbed before by birds, and turns you on to a wavelength that you haven’t been turned on to before, in the bird world.
Nolen Royalty’s digital spark bird was hacking a mail server (and the reproach-with-encouragement he received from adults).
Mine was Datapac.
When I was in high school, my mother was in library school, and she showed me how to connect to the University of Guelph library catalogue by dialing into Datapac, a dial-up Internet precursor. From my humble TRS-80 Model One I discovered that I could not only search the library catalogue in Guelph, but, by making some informed iterative guesses, connect to—or at least see the login prompts for—all manner of other interesting things.
It wasn’t War Games, and I never compromised anything, but it was all fascinating nonetheless, an early taste of what wide area networking might enable.
It was another few years before I saw the Internet itself, via a volunteer position at Victoria College, and another few years after that before I used what came to be known as “the World Wide Web,” but I’d found my spark bird.
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