The Frankenstein computer
I built my first computer from spare parts in 1998, got online, and right-clicked View Source. That one moment changed the direction of my life.
My first computer wasn’t bought from a store. It was assembled from parts — hand-me-downs, salvaged components, whatever I could find or afford. A Frankenstein machine. I wired it together, got it to boot, and called it done.
I was in my mid-twenties. I had no background in technology. I just wanted to know what this internet thing was.
Getting online
The first time I connected, I didn’t have a plan. I just started clicking. Sites loaded slowly over dial-up — a few kilobytes at a time, the modem negotiating its handshake before anything else. Pages appeared incrementally, images filling in from top to bottom like a blind being slowly raised.
I didn’t think about how any of it worked. Then someone mentioned you could see the code.
Right-click. View Source.
I remember staring at what came back and thinking: this is the whole thing. Not a compiled binary. Not something protected or hidden. Just text. Tagged, structured text that the browser knew how to interpret. Anybody could read it. Anybody could copy it. Anybody could change it and see what happened.
What that meant
I didn’t know it then, but that moment was the thing that made me a developer. Not a course, not a job, not a mentor. A right-click on a webpage I didn’t build.
There’s no formal path to learning HTML from scratch in 1998. No YouTube. No freeCodeCamp. No Stack Overflow. You read what you could find, you asked on forums, and you learned by breaking things and fixing them. The community was small enough that people actually answered questions. The bar to entry was low enough that curiosity alone got you in the door.
The machine
The Frankenstein computer eventually died. I don’t remember exactly when — it was gradually replaced, piece by piece, by better hardware over a few years. But the pattern it started never stopped.
Every few years I build something from scratch that I don’t fully understand yet. Every time I right-click View Source on something I find interesting. Every time the answer is in the markup, if you know how to read it.
I’ve been reading it for nearly thirty years.