Before 1996
The curiosity
Importing parts, assembling machines, and dialing into the early internet, before any of it was a job.
Every technical career has a before. Before the vendor badges and the certifications, there was a teenager taking machines apart to understand how they worked, and a young autonomous professional turning that understanding into a living. This is where the instinct that drives everything else was formed.
Hands on hardware, 1991 to 1995
From 1991, the work was autonomous and hands-on: importing computer parts from the United States, assembling and selling custom-built personal computers, and installing, configuring, and troubleshooting them for whoever needed help. This was the era of building a machine from components and making it run, not buying one off a shelf. The systems of the day passed through these hands directly: DOS and CP/M, BASIC, Turbo Pascal, early Windows and office applications, and the database tools that ran small businesses then, Clipper and dBase.
The networks before the internet
Networking did not begin with the web. Long before broadband, the connective tissue was different and harder to work with: Novell NetWare for local servers, bulletin board systems for community and file exchange, early Ethernet networks, and the wide-area technologies of the time, X.25 (known in Brazil as RENPAC) and Frame Relay. When the internet did arrive, it arrived over a modem, reached through a shell account, SLIP, or PPP. Working across all of it meant understanding networks from the wire up, an understanding that later made enterprise networking feel like familiar ground.
BBS, phreaking, and the academic internet
The genuine curiosity of the era went beyond paid work. The explorations of those years included running and using bulletin board systems, the phone-network tinkering of the phreaking scene, hands-on UNIX, and early access to the academic internet. This was learning by doing, in a community that shared knowledge because there was nowhere else to get it. That habit, of digging until something is genuinely understood and then passing it on, never went away.
1995: the first formal role
In 1995, the autonomous work converged into a first formal position. At INTELECTA, a company incubated by SEBRAE-SP, the project was an electronic-data-interchange system for the commercialization of medical and hospital supplies, built on Novell NetWare servers and the PCBoard bulletin board system. It was a real system, solving a real commercial problem, and it marked the point where the hobby and the trade became a profession.
By the end of 1995, the foundation was set: a person who understood machines and networks from first principles, who learned by building, and who already had the instinct to explain. Everything that followed, the vendors, the certifications, the global classrooms, was built on this.