40 Years of Computing: From Apple IIe to AI Agents
My tech journey started in 1984 with an Apple IIe and BASIC. Four decades later, I am building AI agents. Here is every inflection point along the way.
In 1984, I was nine years old, sitting in front of an Apple IIe, typing BASIC commands and watching a cursor blink. Forty years later, I am deploying AI agents that automate entire business functions. The distance between those two moments is a story about curiosity, breaking things, and building things—in that order.
1984–1989: The Foundation
Apple IIe & Commodore 64 — BASIC programming, making the machine do what I wanted. Simple tools, endless possibilities. This was where the pattern started: see a system, understand it, make it do something it was not designed to do.
Commodore Amiga 500 — My eyes opened to multimedia computing. Rexx scripting, DeluxePaint, MIDI music, and the demoscene culture. I learned C here. I also learned to create dongle bypass tools through software patching — not to steal software, but to understand how protection worked. The curiosity was always about the "how."
Amiga 2000 — Expanded memory, expensive hard drives, serious programming in C and assembly. The goal was always the same: understand the system at the deepest level possible.
1989–1994: The Underground
BBS Operator — I ran "Wildcat BBS" on MaxsBBS software. This was pre-internet for most people — bulletin board systems connected by phone lines, trading files and knowledge at 2400 baud.
SasbenJr — My handle in the cracker scene. Specialized in software cracking, creating intros, and reverse engineering protection schemes. Worked with Mexelite as a trainer for upcoming crackers. The NFO files are still in the public domain at Defacto2.
This was not about piracy. It was about understanding systems at the byte level — how software protects itself, how to think like the developer who built the protection, and how to find the elegant path through it. Every enterprise security assessment I do today traces back to this period.
Cracking 4 Newbies (C4N) — Teaching others what I had learned. The cracker ethic was always about knowledge sharing — you learn, you teach, you elevate the community.
1993–1998: The Internet & Going Professional
Unix Shell Access — First internet connection through university accounts. Mastered Unix, discovered Usenet, IRC, and FTP. The world went from local BBS communities to global networks overnight.
IBM PC Transition — 386DX-40, DOS mastery, Norton Commander, PC building business. Applied reverse engineering skills to the PC platform.
Early Web & Linux — Built first websites in raw HTML. Installed Slackware Linux from 20+ floppy disks. Contributed to shareware projects.
1997: Unisys Corporation — The transition from hobbyist hacker to professional. Everything I learned about systems — the deep understanding, the security mindset, the optimization obsession — suddenly had enterprise value. From Windows 3.11 to Windows NT 3.51, I was the person who understood what was actually happening under the hood. I did the hard work behind Y2K remediation.
2000s–2010s: Enterprise Scale
Enterprise Architecture — Multi-national roles, IT architecture lead for global operations. Led massive infrastructure projects, SecOps, and automation at enterprise scale. The efficiency mindset from optimizing assembly code translated perfectly to optimizing million-dollar data centers.
Cloud Revolution — Early adopter. Led organizations through digital transformation. Hired as "patient zero" to build consulting practices, hired hundreds of graduates and professionals. Player, coach, leader. Embraced the Microsoft ecosystem — from on-prem Active Directory to Microsoft 365 and Azure.
2020s: AI & The Current Chapter
AI as the Next Paradigm — The pattern recognition skills from decades of reverse engineering now applied to understanding and implementing AI solutions. Same curiosity, same deep-systems thinking, entirely new tools.
GitHub Copilot changed everything. For someone who started writing assembly to bypass copy protection, having an AI pair programmer feels like coming full circle — the machine is finally helping me write the code, not just executing it.
The Through Line
Every phase built on the last. Cracking taught me security. BBS culture taught me community. Enterprise IT taught me scale. Cloud taught me speed. AI is teaching me leverage.
The nine-year-old typing BASIC on an Apple IIe would be amazed. But he would recognize the impulse — the same one that drove every phase: *"How does this work, and what else can I make it do?"*
