Jacob Friedman

Common local haunts for middle schoolers in my town: the basketball courts, downtown stores and restaurants, or maybe a friend’s basement to play video games. Thanks to me and my friends, there’s an unlikely addition to that list: the community dump. Every weekend we would meet up on our bikes and go check out the discarded electronics bin, hoping for a good find. We would rarely discover anything of quality; usually our treasures were in the neighborhood of broken printers, motherboards, and hard drives. But we were able to repurpose some of these — we used some old hard drives to host a video game server for all of our friends to play on. In doing so, I learned the joys of shell scripting and bash commands, and how they were not esoteric to only the most elite of programming experts. One day, we hit the mother lode: an old laptop from the 1990s that still worked.

Like archaeologists pondering the prehistoric anatomy of a fossil, we experienced everything from the excruciatingly long boot-up time and basic file navigation system to the classic Windows Solitaire victory screen. Seeing the vintage equipment and how it paled in comparison to modern devices sparked my interest in the evolution of technology — the exponential change that is actively and rapidly shaping the future. With my “one wild and precious life,” I want to be somebody who innovates and plays a part in the technological revolution.