I sometimes wonder what got me into servers as a kid. I guess part of it was that the internet and open source were new, and it seemed like to be a "seed" in th

I sometimes wonder what got me into servers as a kid. I guess part of it was that the internet and open source were new, and it seemed like to be a "seed" in the network, rather than a "leech," you needed a server. Plus I had already gotten into building PCs, which is to say, just assembling and disassembling cases, motherboards, and parts. So maybe for my teenage brain it seemed like having a server made you part of some secret internet club, and used a skill I already had. Around the year 1999, I was fortunate to literally have access to my Mom's basement with adequate power and a dedicated DSL modem with a static IP. Which was a total stroke of luck, that a small Seattle ISP called Speakeasy was willing to set that up, even though I was all the way in a suburb of New York. I guess I was part of their "nationwide expansion plan." I was 15. Once the house got this static IP and a fast enough uplink (I remember it being 1.5 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up -- that was enough!) ... I felt compelled to make good use of it. So I would cycle through old desktop PCs and use them as servers. In 2004, I was away at college but still had access to that wired basement. Using some money from summer jobs and odd jobs during the school year, I bought a 1U rackmount server off eBay to store there as a Linux server, and this let me set up a small array of hard drives in it. The static IP let me do remote development via SSH as if that basement were a colo. My biggest issue is that I had no monitoring for power and WAN uplink. I still have a record of the specs: Intel Entry Server Platform, P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB of RAM, two SATA hard disk slots, and built-in dual-NIC (one 100Mbps and one 1000Mbps), which I managed to get for around $600. I then managed to find two 250GB drives to put in there. I ended up using that server as my web development platform from 2004-2009. I also remember one summer where I did remote development over the LAN on that server, working from my desktop development machine (also Linux) via the 1000 Mbps local LAN port, which felt like living in the future. I was using sshfs and NFS and the like to test code directly on the web server and turn over web app releases to the client for review. This was 2005. After which I eventually found cheap colo and cloud options. Funny enough that static IP DSL line was in my Mom's house until she sold it in 2012. Thanks for all the fish, Speakeasy! p.s. there's this fascinating 2002 article still available describing Speakeasy and giving a little vignette of late 1990s Dotcom 1.0 history, where people who ran a popular internet cafe in Seattle could fancy themselves telecom executives! https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20020703&slug=speakeasy28 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20020703&slug...