↤ September 04th, 2026
I started using computers in the late 1980s by way of my parent’s work computers. Macs at the time. For the first ten years of my computing life, I took everything as given: the hardware, the OS, the apps, creativity was limited to writing and drawing apps.
Being a kid and later teen with a lot of time, most of my activity was just going through all apps and menus and clicking on each and every button just to see what they do.
In the late 1990s then I got my first computer that ran a web browser. As before, I went through all menus and buttons and eventually came across the “view source” menu item. And I clicked it. I still remember the shape and colours of the gobbledegook that I was presented with. HTML as I would learn later. It did not make much sense to me. Except that I noticed the <title> tag and that the string inside it was the text in the title bar of the window. Curious as I was, I clicked on the string to edit it and I saw the text in the title bar updating in real time.
This moment and the feelings associated with it are etched into my brain forever. I realised that everything I had taken as given, the hardware, the OS, the apps, were malleable, were understandable, were at the mercy of me just spending enough time to experiment with before I knew I could do literally anything.
That moment was nearly 30 years ago and I have never looked back.
h/t @macdonst for the prompt.