me proudly showing off to my dad that I had spent hours teaching the Timex Sinclair to… balance a checkbook!

dad: my checkbook is already balanced.

me: ahhh, yes well, just imagine though if things had lined up huh??

Nice! My first big Perl program was an IRC bot named GoatNuts back in '96/'97.

I learned a lot of Perl from Randall Schwarz (Programming Perl, O’Reilly) himself (who was doing community service for ‘hacking’ intel) in the #perl chanel on EfNet! Later hung out with him at a mutual friends party and he was an absolute asshat. Best lessons from Randall were to use strict; and always run with the -w flag and then heed and fix the warnings. When you can write beautiful strict perl with no warnings the code is much easier to maintain.

Met Larry Wall (author of Perl) at The Perl Conference 1.0 and he was a gem.

If you find you’re doing any web scraping look into the obscure spaceship operator. It makes parsing a small piece of larger text so much easier if you have good stop and start points.

Cheers on your journey! Not too many proud perl hackers out there but I made a good chunk of coin off that language and it was my first ‘real’ language so it has a dear place in my heart!

Slackware took like 40 3.5" double sided double density disks, and woe betide the poor soul who didn’t label them because the stack was a foot high and you damn well would get them mixed up.

When doing it from home I would frequently run into issues that required me to completely reinstall dos and Telemate to go back to usenet and get help, print the help and then take another stab.

Dos and Linux had different opinions about SCSI chain termination so this usually involved full cover off to move jumpers on the hard drives and sometimes irq jumpers on the motherboard to get the modem AND sound card working right.

Then the fact that to get online once you had slackware installed required you to write your own SLIP/PPP dialup scripts because every ISP was doing their own thing.

Honestly it was a fucking wonderful time. Many happy memories.