It started in 1995, aged 12.

I remember getting my first PC. It was about late '95, early '96. Somehow my dad had managed to get an old PC from work. It had a 286 processor in it and a 40MB HDD. It ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. I had no idea how to use it other than it had the Lotus word processing suite on it. No modem. I don't remember much about it other than I was always on it. Thinking now - I wonder what the point of it was, without the internet and without any games. Either way, I was hooked.

Fast forward a year or so I had my very own Apricot PC, a 486 processor, bigger hard drive, A GAME, and even more importantly a 56k modem. I was on top of the world.

There were a number of challenges with the internet back then:

• It was slow.
• It shared the telephone line with the voice line that we used to call people or for people to call us.
• If someone did call us or if we called them, the internet would be disconnected.
• The dial up number was a premium rate number and it cost something like 10p a minute. Ouch.

I remember one day finding an application called MS Chat. An IRC (internet relay chat) application that connected to the MS chat IRC servers. This opened up a world of possibilities and as a 14 year old I jumped right in, soon switching to the more capable mIRC chat client (I can't believe that thing is still alive) that allowed scripting. I loved it - spending many a late evening chating with strangers and new friends, all while learning to program, hack and create incredible things with this machine.

The scripting in mIRC was the funnest part - we used to make simple bots that would fight against eachother in chat rooms. Mine were called Cheetah bots & I would have 2 of them waiting outside the chat room. If someone were brazen enough to -q me (remove me from being an admin of the chat room) then my Cheetah bots would immediately enter room and reek havoc. They were great days.

[script]
n0=on 1:START: {
n1= if ($version < 5.91) { goto error }
n2= if ($version == 6.01) { goto error }
n3= if ($version == 6.02) { goto error }
n4= halt
n5= :error
n6= /echo 4ERROR This Script needs mIRC v5.91
n7= .timer 1 2 /echo 4Exiting in 3
n8= .timer 1 3 /echo 4Exiting in 2
n9= .timer 1 4 /echo 4Exiting in 1
n10= .timer 1 5 /echo 4Exiting in 0
n11= .timer 1 6 /exit
n12=}
n13=on :disconnect:{ .server irc.linkline.com | halt }
n14=RAW 401::/echo -a 12-4 $2- 12- | /halt

One day I met a guy on there that went by the name of [RTTC]Programming. His real name was Aaron Caffrey and he was very good at hacking. I recall one day, to my surprise my telephone rang at home and it was him - he had somehow hacked his way into finding my telephone number, despite not knowing my name. Many years later, Aaron got into quite some trouble and made the news.

By this time I was approaching 15-16 years old and was spending every spare minute writing malware and DoS bots in C++. I'm not even sure that those terms had been invented by then but safe to say I had a chatroom full of compromised PCs where I could issue a command like !kill <ip address> and they would send packets and packets of data and take other users offline. Back in those days, the internet was very basic and we were never doing this for any other reason that fun, learning and to reign supreme in the chat rooms.

Then one day - disaster strikes - Microsoft announces that they are closing the MS Chat servers. I was devistated and over night last contact with the hundreds of friends I had made. I can remember only two handles of my friends - Aaron [RTTC]Programming and Richard SyStEmX and of course, my own - Kernel[Stealth].

Ahh youth.

Anyway, enough rambling - that is the story of how I got into computing!