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What were you doing 20 years ago?
20 years ago DevCentral made its first technical community post and created a place where F5 users could learn from each other.
What where you doing 20 years ago? Working in technology or a different industry? Or maybe you were doing something else incredible with your life. Share your stories with us here!
As for me, 20 years ago I was in high school studying for the SATs (which were a lot different 20 years ago), sending out college applications, and looking at prom dresses! ๐
Join the 20th Anniversary Group Hub to see other stories and share your own!
- alfozaavAdmin
20 years ago - I was drinking juice and eating a lot of candies ๐ซ๐ฌ ๐
alfozaav - your smile in this pic is SO recognizable! Great pic.
and thanks for dropping the *old-man* bomb on me again today!! ๐
Living the good life!
20 years ago I was helping to build up and expand the MVP Program at Microsoft during the week, and hosting Halo lan parties in my basement on the weekends.
- momahdyEmployee
20 years back, I've just got based my primary school ๐ a key highlight happened a year before that time @ 2002 which was watching WorldCup 2002 amazing memories ๐ , at that time I used to work on Pascal DOS system at that time.
Just before the period I wrote about - so early 2003 - I was also working for a company whose primary product was written in Pascal (Borland Turbo Pascal FTW) and ran on DOS systems with a back-end database in (then) Novell's BTrieve. Their other product was SCO & DEC Unix hosting Thoroughbred Basic applications.
Feels like several lifetimes ago!
- AubreyKingF5Moderator
If only 20 years ago I was in high school, but I had graduated college.. was an internet systems administrator working 80 hour weeks trying to prove myself in the sysops / secops landscape. It was right around this time I developed my first botnet for legitimate use. It was the sanest method to scale our sysadmin functions globally, going from 13,000 employees to 3,000 employees in a 2 week span.
80 hours a week. Yikes! ๐ฑ
- Leslie_HubertusRet. Employee
20 years ago, I was a full-time university student with 2 part-time jobs. I was an RA for my dorm at the University of Texas at Austin, and also worked as a hostess at a local restaurant. My roommate and I decorated one of our dorm room walls by completely covering the thing with those free AOL CDs we kept getting in the mail. Blade II had come out the previous year, and basically played on repeat in the common room.
I spent that summer doing an opera performance program in Salzburg (I was the Dritte Dame in Mozert's Die Zauberflรถte), during the hottest, deadliest heat wave Europe had seen in 500 years. We'd take breaks to go to a local grocery store just to stand in the refridgerated section to cool off!
In 2003 I had finished high school and then took a year off before heading to college for Computer Systems. At the same time I had been deep diving Gentoo Linux and fooling around with various webhosting projects and PHP coding.
- AubreyKingF5Moderator
I gotta say.. working w/ Gentoo taught me more about operating systems - ALL OF THEM - than anything else. Ground-up manual build EVERY time.. so much to learn! So many hardware devices!
Same, it really helped learning the nuts and bolts of things. Later on Arch Linux was another whose guides and wikis really helped regardless of the actual Linux OS.
THIS IS going all in on "where were you 20 years ago".
#Courage
I'm all for transparency but for my HS photo - that's a nope. ๐20 years ago - I was welcoming my oldest child into the world that year. Sleep deprived, clueless, and having a blast as she learned how to communicate and interact with the world.
The initiation into parenthood is a doozy! But there's nothing like watching them make connections in their brain.
20 years ago I was .. just quitting a full time job to work for myself for a couple of years; which was not a particularly successful (financially!) period but it directly led to me joining F5 in 2005 and allowed me to broaden my skillset and learn what it's like to work without a safety net..
What I am always surprised by (I don't know why, considering I'm still here?) is that 2/3rds of the people who interviewed me back in 2005 are still with F5 today!
You'd have to look back 30 years to find me still at school..
Phew 2003 is many many moons ago!
It was three years before my first contact with F5. Back then my world view was only firewalls, mail gateways and anti-virus. My world was just so small ๐
- buulamAdmin
In 2003 I had recently dropped out of going after a Science degree and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I found a Network Specialist program and enrolled in it that fall. The first of many steps that shaped my career.
2003 .. that can't be. Surely 20 years ago is 1993... no? I'm old? ๐ญ
A cousin recently called my high school hits "oldies" and I almost cried.
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