#000 – Douglas A. Brush: You’re Always a Student – You Never Stop Learning - a podcast by Douglas A. Brush | Weekly Interviews w/ InfoSec Pros

Before we tackle the hearts and minds of some of the leaders and influencers in cyber security, I wanted to provide a little background about me and how I got started in cyber security.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a hacker.

In 1981, at an impressionable age five, I plopped down in front of a Texas Instruments TI99/4A computer. It had a whopping 3MHz CPU, 16K of RAM, and 16 colors. My parents got one for the home and I mostly used it to play video games. My favorite game was Hunt the Wumpus.

At some point, I came across Compute! magazine that had instructional pages of BASIC, spaghetti code programs that you could use to run on your computer. After hours of painstakingly transcribing lines and lines of GOTO commands into the TI99, I would have a small colored box bounce from one side of the screen to the other. Then back again. #Fun.

[caption id="attachment_1332" align="alignleft" width="173"]“Hi sugar. After you store my 'portable' computer, can you please light my Pall Mall and fetch me a double Alabama Slammer?" Image source: Oldcomputers[/caption]

The Reagan 1980's roared on and computers gained greater adoption in the business community, particularly in finance and accounting. However, computers for the general public consumption were still in their infancy. Glorified calculators with some generic word processing capabilities. Then movies like Tron and War Games came out. Whoa. They depicted the anti-heros as computer users, but different. They were hacker misfits, but cool in their own way. They could command computers to do powerful things. I wanted to do that.

My parents continued to bring technology into the home (they were leading communication consultants and authors) including new computers to play with, break, and hopefully, repair. In the summer of 1983 we made the investment in a Compaq Portable Plus. This was also a deciding point because it set me down the IBM/PC market path (sorry Apple). Mind you, this beast of plastic and metal was marketed as "portable" at 28 pounds. Nine-inch monochrome monitor and detachable keyboard? Heck yeah I'll travel with this thing! And we did!

The real selling point to me on this computer was WordPerfect 3 with the spell checking feature and a printer. No longer was I chained to homework assignments of handwritten drafts! I was able to write a book report on birds, it showed me how horrid my spelling was, and I could print it. Sold. However, my final submission caused a certain amount of controversy with my teacher. She accused my parents of writing this masterpiece. With Kerouac-esque lines like "Cardinals are red," I can see the confusion. She simply couldn’t understand how a kid could use a computer to write a paper. This resulted in my parents meeting with the teacher and principal to explain how I could possibly do such a thing.

Luckily things started to change and computers were becoming more mainstream. They were more and more likely to be common appliances in the home.

“I asked for a car, I got a computer. How’s that for being born under a bad sign.”– Ferris Buller

[caption id="attachment_1333" align="alignleft" width="568"]A MUD. By Source, Fair use,...