I, Hacker: Chapter 2, Part 1: “Not Built for Classrooms”

 By the fall of 1982, I was enrolled at a mid-tier state university nobody outside the county had ever heard of. I won't name it — not out of loyalty, but because it doesn’t matter. The kind of place where football was more important than funding, where the professors had long since stopped caring, and the students never started.

I moved into the dorms two weeks before classes began. My roommate was a lacrosse major, or maybe marketing — I forget. He played Journey too loud and smelled like chewing tobacco. We coexisted like poorly written subroutines, each looping around the other without ever colliding.
College, I quickly learned, was not about learning. It was about ritual. You showed up to class, pretended to take notes, nodded at the right times. In return, they gave you a letter that supposedly meant something. The real lessons were found in fluorescent-lit hallways and vending machine alcoves — whispered shortcuts and survival strategies passed down like oral tradition from one dazed freshman to the next.

I sat through Econ 101 and Intro to Western Civ with the attention span of a broken timer interrupt. The professors droned from yellowed notes they'd recycled since the Nixon administration. Everything felt like a copy of a copy of a copy.

But there was one place — one shrine to actual purpose — that felt alive: the computer lab.
It was tucked away in the basement of the engineering building, down a concrete stairwell that always smelled faintly of mildew and burnt coffee. The sign on the door said AUTHORIZED STUDENTS ONLY — which, ironically, only made it more appealing. Inside, the room hummed with electricity and fluorescent light. Terminals lined the walls like soldiers, each one connected to a DEC mainframe that lived in a locked room on the floor above, humming like a god behind glass.

This wasn’t a toy anymore. No more blinking blue cursors. These machines ran a time-sharing system that let multiple users log in simultaneously, executing jobs in shared bursts of CPU time. It was elegant, efficient, and — most importantly — alive.

I got access through a class that technically didn’t start until second semester, but no one checked credentials. The lab monitors were grad students too sleep-deprived to care. I walked in, claimed a terminal, and never left. The interface was primitive — no GUI, no mouse, just a black screen and a white prompt:

> LOGIN:

My student account was limited to a personal directory and some coursework folders. But even then, I could tell the real system was much bigger — multiple users, shared memory spaces, nested file trees. There were directories I couldn’t access, commands that gave only denial messages, tools hidden behind layers of user permissions. It was like staring at the surface of an ocean and knowing, instinctively, there were depths below.

I started staying late. Sometimes past midnight. The janitor would mop around my feet. I slept through classes and read UNIX manuals printed on fanfold paper. The terminal didn’t blink. It pulsed. And I wanted in.

I began learning C first, then Pascal, and a little FORTRAN just to round it out. The university had lecture slides, but they were outdated, dry, and hopelessly sanitized. I taught myself from source code — from the comments of long-departed engineers who spoke like poets between the lines.

/* This hack fixes a buffer overflow if the student input is too long.
   Why are they always trying to break the input box? */

Back in the dorms, my roommate would ask what the hell I was doing down there every night.

“Homework,” I’d say.

“Homework doesn’t make your eyes look like that,” he said once.

He wasn’t wrong. I looked like I was mainlining caffeine through my corneas.
But what he didn’t understand — what nobody did — was that I’d found something real. Something alive. Beneath the layers of course requirements and student accounts, there was a structure — a system. A world of rules, gates, locks, and keys. It wasn’t about breaking anything. It was about understanding everything.

And every locked door only made me more certain: I wasn’t here to get a degree. I was here to get in.