Binary Memories – Part II
A memory of my first years in programming, between Delphi, IRC, hacker magazines, RATs and the chaotic arrival of Crazy Leo, who introduced Slackware as a kind of rite of passage.
Delphi was an incredible joy in those first years of mine as a programmer, and I loved the little I knew. It was enough to earn praise from adults who clearly didn't understand anything I was doing, and even less of what they were looking at.
But it worked.
I had a childhood friend named Daniel. Well, we're still friends, but more distant, because we grew up and now basically live at opposite ends of the country. I like to think we see each other once every pandemic. And it's nice, because it feels like the last time we saw each other was yesterday.
Daniel followed his path as an economist. And I followed mine, extremely obscure until then. But, back then, we loved the hacker magazines they sold in Brazil. At the same time, I was already living on IRC networks, firmly working as ‘op’ in channels and even as NetAdmin on some crazy networks and as IRCop on others.
On the side, my friend Daniel and I bought magazines at newsstands, because the USRobotics internet wasn't enough anymore, and those magazines came with all kinds of software. A great memory of Revista Hacker.
And not just that one: there was Top Hacker, H4ck3r (from Digerati), Digerati Hacker, Universidade Hacker and also one of my favorites, which was Geek.
And it was through Revista Hacker that I read the word: Sub7. Few people must remember that RAT, which was the terror of IRC and ICQ. A little ‘just kidding’ trojan that made hacking into people amazing; once you had it in hand, the next step was to go after the famous ‘Joiner’, which a lot of the time was nothing more than a script to merge two files.
In other words, you took the .exe and turned it into a .jpg, but that was a sham. It only changed the icon. But we were satisfied with that.
The infamous Geek magazine I talked about so much, where my favorite software was...
Daniel and I were the kings of RATs, we loved ‘trolling’ people, all kinds of people, and RATs like Sub7, Back Orifice and Netbus are, in a way, predecessors of another tool I used a lot in the 2000s: keyloggers.
Maybe I'll talk more about keyloggers in another chapter.
Then, in 1999, I met Crazy Leo.
A genius who ended up in my town after some crazy accident, who told stories about fixing a laptop in the forest under torrential rain. Leo is an extraordinary creature, an incredible mind, extremely fast, and he was, for a month or two, my teacher. No more than that, because nobody could stand spending more time with him. But yes, he's a good person.
Wearing his glasses and teaching Daniel and me, since 1999, the principles and values of Free Software, something I must confess I looked down on until 2016. But I'll talk about that another time too.
Leo was so bizarre. So bizarre that, in our first lessons, he sat me down in the chair of his lab and said the words that, back then, sounded like magic. He said: you will learn SLACKWARE.
Imagine someone saying that slowly and confidently. I was terrified; I didn't know what it was, only that it was Linux, but I had no idea how hard it was.
And the first lesson was building a driver for a modem... and for Slackware.
To be continued...