One of the unique things about working at Ars is how many of the members of our editorial staff got their start working in technology—some in a very hands-on way. Ken Fisher, our fearless leader, worked in college IT while in graduate school; Peter Bright worked at the British Library in the digital preservation department, working to recover and safeguard digital data. And Lee Hutchinson was an enterprise architect at Boeing at one point (whatever that is).

But some Ars staffers got their starts in tech early—whether they were auspicious or not. When others were flipping burgers or working paper routes, we were pounding keyboards by the glow of CRTs (well, some of us are old enough to have used old tube-based monitors). And others stumbled into tech jobs in unexpected ways, setting us off on the courses that would lead to Ars.

Sean Gallagher, IT Editor

So, do you know anything about computers?

Thanks to being at the right place at the right time on at least two occasions, I managed to stumble into a short but relatively successful career in IT. And it all starts in 1982.

I had taken a BASIC programming course as an elective in my sophomore year of high school, moved on to do an independent study course in FORTRAN, and basically became a burden on my school's timeshare account on a PDP-11 at SUNY Stony Brook. Much to the relief of the Math department, I moved just before my senior year. But at my new high school, I got drafted into writing two pieces of software for my principal—who just also happened to be my father.

Both were written to run on one of the schools' Apple II+ computers. One, called Plates, was a database system for registering students' cars for school parking permits. The other, creatively called PaintSched, was a program that tried to optimize the calendar for painting the classrooms of every city school in Plattsburgh, New York.I got paid for neither of these, so it wasn't technically a job—more like an internship with room and board. But the experience would pay off in strange ways later on.

When I got commissioned in the Navy, I bought my first PC. But I was told by my executive officer on the USS Iowa that computer skills were not a desirable trait for a naval officer. "Computers are a clerical device," he declared.

Then, in 1988, I arrived at Special Boat Squadron Two, a coastal and river patrol boat command at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek. One of the first things my new commanding officer (a Navy SEAL commander) asked me was if I knew anything about computers. I mentioned I had a PC, and had done some BASIC and FORTRAN programming, and had even installed a 10 megabyte hard drive in the PC I owned.

The commander smiled and said, "That's great. Because we're supposed to be testing something called a LAN here, with fiber optics or something that one of our reserve officers convinced SPAWAR that we should be a test site for."

That reservist was G. Hill Price, a Computer Science lecturer on networking and graphics at Old Dominion University and descendant of Confederate general A.P. Hill. He was also a Navy Reserve commander (he would eventually make captain), and he had managed to get the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command onboard with using SBR 2 to test a series of different networking platforms, building up to a fiber-optic LAN based on 3Com's 3+Open (technology licensed from Microsoft that would later be known as Microsoft LAN Manager, and then be folded into Windows NT).

There was a contractor lined up to install the trial, but there was only one problem: the guys they sent were Mac specialists, and had never worked with PCs. Also, our network was in a series of trailers, because the "temporary" building from World War II that had been the headquarters had been condemned.

Over the course of the next two years, I accumulated a host of collateral duties which all seemed to be connected by one thing: I could figure out computers and networking stuff. I became the intelligence officer, because I could figure out how to put together images for briefings digitally and print instant slides. I became Computer Security Officer and Command Security Manager because I handled the passwords and the encrypted drives, and figured out what TEMPEST meant. I developed dBASE II and Clipper database applications to track projects. And I spent many hours polishing the ends of fiber leads, mostly because chief petty officers insisted on arranging their desks in a way that led to them rolling their office chairs over them.

By the time I left the Navy, my path had already been made fairly clear. I got a job with a 3Com and Wyse reseller doing customer support, network administrator training, pulling Ethernet runs and doing SCO Unix 386 installs. Of course, that company went under just six months after I was hired, as 3Com and Wyse both seriously retrenched (In Wyse's case, a 3-out-of-4 Dead On Arrival rate for its PCs might have had something to do with it).

Not too long after that, I was brought in to interview by Cincinnati Bell Information Systems Federal for a contract at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Army Test Labs had been a big 3Com 3+Open customer (as well as a user of Hewlett Packard's version, HP LAN Manager), and was in the process of moving over to Microsoft LAN Manager with Microsoft OS/2 servers (yes, that was an actual thing).

The interview turned out to really be a service call—the contracting team didn't know anything about networks, really, and after a brief sit-down interview, they brought me in to meet the ARL point of contact. There was this problem: the network connectivity for all the computers on one floor was flaky, and nobody knew why.

I took a look at a clipboard I was handed with the configuration information for all the machines, and was invited to sit down at one. I found the problem in under a minute: they had given every computer on the floor the same static IP address.

I got hired as the network engineering lead.

Sebastian Anthony, Editor of Ars Technica UK

It started with Doom...

I got my first job in tech when I was still at school, at the age of 13. We had a pretty rundown computer room, filled with a variety of 386s, 486s, and early Pentiums, running Windows 3.11 and, if you were lucky, Windows 95.

It started with me trying to get the computers to run Doom. I had to do some HIMEM and EMM386.sys hax, I think, to get the older PCs to run it. And getting them all to talk via TCP/IP or IPX was a real pain in the ass. Anyway, eventually I was put in charge of configuring all of the computers -- and then a few months later the headmaster made me the network administrator.

I had a lot of fun chopping and changing CPUs and RAM sticks to get as many computers as possible capable of playing games—and then we'd lock the doors on Friday and have some amazing network gaming sessions. One of my fondest memories is from a year or two later, when I overclocked a Celeron 300A to 500MHz--a pretty beefy overclock back in those days. That early love of multiplayer gaming would eventually result in me running (and attending) some pretty big LAN parties.

And that's how I got my first job in tech. Later, I would learn Perl and make some early dynamic cgi-bin websites, mostly for the purpose of making some simple browser-based games. After that, I started colocating Linux servers, so I didn't have to pay someone else to host my Perl scripts! The rest is history. (Actually, the rest of my "genesis" story is really good, but I'll save that for another time.)