Growing Up Geek: Jesse Hicks

I've never been one for nostalgia, but if I I had to choose a Proustian element from my geeky childhood -- a singular sense-memory that evokes a whole constellation of related feelings -- I'd pick the eerie keening of a 28.8 modem. That high, quavering sound, for me, conjurs up the earliest days of my geekdom, when computers were slow, landlines were king and the internet was young.

I was twelve when my family got our first computer: a 486DX that first appeared without a hard drive. My mom had found a great deal at a computer show...or so it had seemed. That missing 120MB hard drive, as you may have guessed, severely limited functionality. But once that problem was remedied, I was off and running with DOS and XTree, happily deleting essential system files. The learning process had begun.