This was before my first boxed Linux purchase of Mandrake, but learned to dual boot on the home’s 300 ton HP w/ 2gb hdd (98SE, I think) and was fucking around with alternate shells like Afterstep, GeoShell, bbox, LiteStep, etc.

Learned about doing away with the standard ui completely and putting all the menus into right click, so there were times I’d walk away leaving just a wallpaper and cursor. Family couldn’t figure how to do anything, so I pretended I’d hit some key combo to bring menus which just baffled the fuck out of them, got labeled a “hacker”.

Very first os was, as a 7 yo, DOS 2.0 on my grandfather’s dual-floppy IBM (to keep a text file of my baseball cards), and a friend of the family who worked at JHU/APL in video production would let me mess around with the 3.11 boxes at the Kossiakoff center.