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So yeah, I loved bulletin boards. I ran bulletin boards forever, until bulletin boards weren't a thing. I ran a bulletin board in high school that I gave all my friends, because internet access was still rare in the early '90s... That's how I sort of started running Linux, was I'd run -- I was running OS/2 Warp, becaus... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Adam Jacob:** I loved that stuff. So fun. I still love it. It's the funnest thing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. A lot of detail in there, really. |
**Adam Jacob:** Sorry. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, what I mean by a lot of detail in there is by no means what you shared is that is that that's where the curiosity begins. And I think that's why it's kind of interesting to kind of just dig back into that kind of cliché question, which I really hate leading with, which is "How'd you get started?... |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, that's how I got started. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know. |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, I was all-in. I was taking it apart... I had a job where I worked in a comic book in a role-playing game store. It sounds idyllic, because it kind of was, now that I talk about it this way... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The times, man. Those were the times. |
**Adam Jacob:** They were great. So I would save some of the money that I wasn't spending on comic books and I would spend it on gear, you know? And yeah, it was great. I still -- when I think about my life and I think about my career, I still kind of think of it as one unbroken arc from discovering that it was awesome... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At what point did it go from hobby to "Wow, I can actually do this as a career"? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. So one of my old friends, still one of my best friends - we see him all the time; comes to family dinner every couple of weeks - got a job at 16. I already had a job, because I was working in a Comic Book store, but he got a job working for this ISP. So to sort of set the scene for people who aren... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Switches, and... |
**Adam Jacob:** \[11:49\] Yeah. And then they were running -- there was a FreeBSD server and a Windows NT server, and that was the ISP. And so he had gotten a job doing tech support for them. And they wanted -- they were looking to hire another person, and so he wound up... He was like "Hey, my friend Adam can totally ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I have no idea what Skinny Puppy is. |
**Adam Jacob:** Skinny Puppy is an industrial band. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Yeah, that's-- |
**Adam Jacob:** It should set a vibe. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Adam Jacob:** If you think of that early '90s cyberpunk, that vision of what the future would be - he kind of looked that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. Okay. |
**Adam Jacob:** When that was still a thing you could be, and you were being actually edgy, instead of like Hot Topic. It hadn't quite reached Hot Topic yet. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I Googled some images and I'm seeing what I'm seeing, and it's very large hair, very mascara... |
**Adam Jacob:** Skinny Puppy? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, sure, because that era was -- it also overlapped with hair metal, you know? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, yeah. You had to have massive hair. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, yeah. He didn't really have massive hair in my memory, but I didn't know him for that long. He had a hot girlfriend, I remember that. I thought that was cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** All black leather... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Strong cheekbones... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, lots of German cheekbones. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Adam Jacob:** Anyway, I thought that was incredible... But he was also kind of a slacker, because this was the least interesting part of his day. And it was the most interesting part of mine. So I would just do work for him, you know? Because he was, whatever, too busy, by which I mean not there, you know? And it was... |
The library had still books of all the Washington state law, you know? They would still publish them in volumes; it was like the Encyclopedia Britannica, or whatever... And she found this loophole in state law where you could be concurrently enrolled in college, and high school at the same time. And if you dropped out ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you dropped out. |
**Adam Jacob:** So I dropped out, went to Arizona, got a job at another ISP, and... Yeah, it was that or running a children's theater, and the ISP paid better. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So you traded ISPs, essentially. You went from one in Vancouver to one in Arizona via a loophole in the law that let you drop out. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. And I had another teacher who was very upset that I wasn't going to go to college. So he was like "If I find you a college, you have to go." And I was like "Sure." And so he did. He found DeVry, before DeVry was really that big of a deal. There were only two DeVrys. And yeah, so I wound up going t... |
\[16:07\] So I was there for one trimester. Because I'd got this job working in this ISP, and it paid as well as the average degree graduate from DeVry. And so my mom was like "Hey, do you--" you know, I called my mom, and was like "I think I should drop out, because I'm getting paid." And she was like "Oh, you should ... |
And then those ISPs, in that era - it was a big growth time for getting everybody on the internet. So the big thing everybody was doing in technology was just getting people on the internet. So that first ISP I worked for was in someone's garage.... All sorts of fun stories that I can't really tell about that ISP. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? |
**Adam Jacob:** No, I really can't. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What makes you not be able to? |
**Adam Jacob:** It's complicated. The people in this era, sometimes the people who ran ISPs were -- I'm going to say sketchy. So if you talk to people who worked in that era in ISPs, they almost all have stories where they're somehow connected to mobsters, and drugs... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? |
**Adam Jacob:** Because it was a growth mom and pop industry, where you could make a lot of money very quickly, and it took some capital investment. And so you can see how it's comes together in a certain shape. And so everybody I know who worked in that era, if you ask them, they have a story like that. And I have one... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's easy to trace you back to the company, and probably easy to find their name. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, exactly. And I don't need any of that. But rest assured they're funny stories. I shouldn't have even mentioned it, but... |
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