I started as a cracker. I cracked sharewares and games for all the kids in school and was somewhat sought after. I ruled the schools' Novell LAN with an iron-fi

I started as a cracker. I cracked sharewares and games for all the kids in school and was somewhat sought after. I ruled the schools' Novell LAN with an iron-fist and a well-stocked boot floppy. Sure, I was mostly more talk than walk, bragged a lot; but on several occasions, I was able to pull off some stunts before a thankful audience of "cool kids" (you're welcome, Imran ;-) But as I got better at reversing, I needed more sophisticated tools, and I needed to write them myself. I usually did my cracking on request, cobbled up something quickly before class or early in the evening, and took floppies of keygens and patches with me to school in the morning. I wasn't exactly a jock, but I was cool; had gelled hair, baggy jeans, a walkman, wore sunglasses in class, etc. Pretty much riding on Neo's coat-tails, thanks to the then new movie, The Matrix. But I distinctly remember one winter when I didn't give a shit anymore. I was developing my own x86 disassembler and had hand-written opcode tables on my wall. I remember waking up later and later for school, not bothering to dress, avoiding friends, and refusing to take crack requests. I pretty quickly out-grew all my familiar tools and techniques. The official Microsoft and Intel documentation wasn't cutting it. I was fedup with crap "popular opinion" in the assembly-programming fora. I realized all the crackers and black-hats were mostly full of shit and didn't know what they were talking about. I "felt" my tools were primitive, and there was more to life than mastering the quirks of crappy compilers and assemblers from MS or Borland. I had just watched my treasured knowledge of MS DOS go obsolete, none of the old tricks worked. So I bought myself a bootleg, Xerox copy of the Dragon Book. Soon after, Tanenbaum's OSD&I. Boy met theory, and boy had to grow up fast. I realized I loved programming when I no longer did anything else :-P