I was scrolling through old tech nostalgia pictures online and ran into this screenshot of a classic Windows 98 desktop, mountain lion wallpaper, AIM running man, Encarta 99, the works. It stopped me mid-scroll, because it looked almost exactly like the desktop I grew up with.

In January 2000, my father brought home our first computer: an assembled Pentium III, somewhere between 2 and 5 GB of hard drive space, and 128MB of RAM. It had a Creative sound card installed, which felt like a big deal at the time, everything suddenly had real sound instead of beeps. I was 9 years old, and that machine became the center of my world for the next few years.

I spent hours on Need for Speed, Sonic, a Star Wars game I only remember as “Sith,” and whatever “ultra fighter” game I could get running. In between the games, I quietly taught myself PowerPoint and Word, no one showed me, I just clicked around until things made sense. It’s funny looking back now, since that’s still basically how I learn most software today.

That PC broke down more than once over the years. Each time, my father just took it in and got it repaired rather than giving up on it. I didn’t think much of it then, but it’s clear now that those repairs were him making sure I kept having a machine to learn on.

Finding that screenshot today was a small thing, but it pulled up a lot. That beige tower with the Creative sound card was the start of a path that eventually turned into a career in software.