We were too poor to have a computer when I was a kid. That’s not a metaphor or a badge—just a fact. Computers existed, sure, but they lived in schools and offices, not houses like mine.

I worked on them every day at school. Enough to know how they functioned. Enough to understand their value. But owning one? That felt like something other people did. People with different lives.

Years later, I was married, had kids, and was building computers for work. Irony doesn’t even cover it. I could assemble them, troubleshoot them, keep entire systems running—but still didn’t believe one would ever belong to me. Computers were tools for labor, not things you brought home.

The bosses had computers at home. That should tell you everything. One of them eventually sold me his old machine. Not out of charity—just convenience. It was a laptop, technically, though nothing like the ones we see today. It was big. Heavy. Awkward. The kind of machine that demanded a table and your full attention.

You didn’t just turn it on. You fed it. A boot disk first. Then another disk for the operating system. It made noise. Took time. Let you know it was working. And every time my wife walked past it, the floor shook just enough to make her nervous.

I remember spending hours and hours learning code. All the mistakes. All the half-baked ideas. Late-night phone calls that started with, “I think I’ve got it figured out.” Disk swapped the next day to see if I was right. Composition notebooks filled with lines of code in different languages, written by hand because that’s how you kept track of what worked and what didn’t.

Back then, you needed to know as many languages as possible. Different operating systems for different functions. No universal solution. No safety net. You adapted or you stalled out. The machine didn’t care how tired you were or how close you thought you were—it only cared whether you got it right.

That computer didn’t symbolize progress. It symbolized disbelief. The idea that this thing—once distant, untouchable—was now sitting in my house still felt unreal. Like it might disappear if I got too comfortable.

Now I sit here with multiple machines at my disposal, each faster, lighter, quieter than anything I could’ve imagined back then. I move between them without thinking. Open files. Sync work. Switch tasks like it’s nothing.

But I do my best to remember where that ease came from.

I remember the weight. The disks. The waiting. The way one wrong move could bring everything to a halt. I remember learning patience because there was no other option. Learning respect—for the tool, for the process, for the work itself.

I’ve come so far over the years. But I carry those early lessons with me. Not as nostalgia, and not as hardship for its own sake—but as a reminder.

The tools may change.
The discipline doesn’t.