For A While I Was A Tech Genius

By Sarnaa Archie

At eight years old, I was a tech genius on the verge of revolution. I had tech millionaire dreams. (Back then, nobody in tech made a billion, yet. At least that I knew of.) So maybe, I thought, I could invent something cool, and it would make me mega-rich.

My parents gave me a Commodore 64. It was camel-colored, thick-wedge-looking, and had brown keys that clacked. You connected it to a TV to see what was going on. It came with a tape deck: how you stored your files and software. So that was my first computer. I pressed the keys, and the sweet sound of haptic feedback sent a rush through my body and my arms into that sweet, satisfying drug receptor in my brain.

The screen lit up. A block appeared then just as fast disappeared and reappeared repeatedly. My eyes widened and glazed over. The corner of my mouth turned up. Maybe I drooled a little. The computer wanted me to say something to it in a language it could understand. It wanted to hear what I had to say. It wanted instructions and commands.

I reached for the spiral-bound manual. It had pages of lines of short words like “int,” “for,” and “if-then,” followed by sequences of numbers and “this equals that.” Then, I spent the rest of the night punching the keys with no idea how late it was.

I was six or seven and didn’t need a clock.

It was the summer, too, and I could stay up as late as I wanted.  (I thought).

When I got done, I played snake and tore up the code, line by line, to figure out how it all worked. I changed numbers and variables and other things.

I broke it.

I then made it work again. I changed the colors and the length of the snakes.

I made the walls imaginary portals to the other side of the screen. So, a snake would hit the wall and not die.

Mom was a computer scientist for NASA. She and her work friends built the space shuttle and wrote programs to calculate how this thing fit so that the whole thing wouldn’t explode. We had a manual of the space shuttle in our house.

I scanned the pages, glared at the diagrams, redrew the contraptions on lined paper, and tried to figure out what made the damned thing lift itself past the explosive and invisible crust of the atmosphere.

I never did, though—something about physics and lift and jet propulsion I hadn’t come to grasp yet.

I took apart watches, radios, and other devices. I took apart computers until I learned to build them again and design them myself. I constructed multiple machines from spare parts I traded for or bought with money I found or convinced away from a family member or a friend.

I built websites, first on Geocities. Then, I built a server.

A guy I knew connected it to his network and put it up online from his loft in downtown Atlanta. After that, I got a job at the Linux General Store and designed its inventory management and cash register system. (Though I failed at actually building it.)

Then John got fired. I liked John.

It made me mad. So I quit.

I was 15.

It made sense at the time.

Johnny and I got together and started a business building servers for small businesses—Yellowdragon Systems, I named it. I filed the paperwork with the state myself. This process, similar to programming, created a feedback loop in my brain and the sudden realization that with the computer, I could build worlds of my design, virtual ones, but with words on pieces of paper, arranged just so, I could build real-world conceptual machines.

About that time, I saw blade servers—these almost razor-thin computers—in CIO magazine. I imagined they would change everything and make “cloud computing” possible.

He disagreed. “Nobody would put their sensitive financial information in the cloud,” he said. Then later went to work at a company that made a fortune hosting their client’s sensitive financial information in the cloud. They sold their company for hundreds of millions.

I devoured Red Herring, Fast Company, and WIRED Magazines.

Documentaries about artificial intelligence and robotics in the 90s were fascinating and not click-baitey.

I could see the future, and it was great, convenient, comfortable, and as awful and beautiful as it already is and always has been, but better, still. But this time, we would have robots and genius computers that talked to us that we could talk to and be understood by.

I created a web portal for the mobile web when it was still barely a thing and sold the business to a wireless company I went to work for. They didn’t want the thing I built. They wanted me, my ideas, research, design, and tinkering to discover what’s next and share those things with the real technologists who could build them. So they made me director of research and development, and all I had to do was imagine, research, describe, design, and present.

I was 17 and not mega-rich, at least not in cash. (I did own a hefty block of the company’s shares.)

From my early days taking apart watches and radios and failing to assemble them again, I accepted that I wasn’t an electrical engineer. It was a way to learn about the world, take it apart, and find out what made it tick. I realized, especially after trying to splice a live wire—and not dying—that I should find a safer set of things to open. I turned my attention to companies, frameworks like politics, power, law, government, money, and any system I could dissect conceptually—in my mind, on paper, or in recorded lectures. This was about the time I got interested in computers—at eight.

Now, the world looks today like what I thought was obvious back then. I say this not to my credit; I was reading about these innovations in magazines and PBS specials—not quite soothsaying—but I was extrapolating a little. I combined what I learned about business and economics, human and organizational behavior, and competition and incentives. I did a little extrapolation about the future, especially the blade servers. It seemed obvious to me, economically speaking, that two things would happen: 1) the economics of cloud computing would become too good for most businesses to ignore, and 2) the cloud computing providers (or the market in general) would solve the security risks.

But, I didn’t know when these two things would happen and therefore could not correctly estimate how long it would take John to eat his words. (It was about two years.)

I didn’t use the insights to make a mint in the markets or develop a cloud computing or adjacent company. (Though that’d be a fantastic story.) And I didn’t learn anything exceptionally compelling at the time or the two years later, except this: I should now direct my attention to figuring out how to capitalize on my insights, and like the gadgets I took apart and the lines of code I manipulated and all the other things I picked up along the way, that there is immense value in taking things apart and not being able to put them together again if, like a butcher, you can make a buck off the pieces.