The curiosity

Curiosity and awe

Before any machine, there was a teacher. His grandmother — his mother's mother, who had crossed an ocean from Germany to Brazil with her family and started the world over — talked with the boy, from his earliest age, about everything her world contained. The garden of her house, with its small insects and earthworms, its flowers and weeds, its tomatoes, carrots, and strawberries. The night sky full of stars, the vastness of the Universe, and the human consciousness there to behold it. She taught him that all of it answers curiosity with more curiosity, and that awe is not a childish thing to outgrow but a way of paying attention.

It took. Had computers not claimed him a few years later, he would almost certainly have gone the scientist's way — the pull toward how things work was already there, installed early and installed deep. The machines simply gave that curiosity a keyboard.

Signals in the air

Before the computers, there was radio — and the radio was his father's. An engineer drawn to every new piece of technology and, just as much, to the people it connected, Rodolfo's father was an avid amateur operator who worked the bands both local and long-distance. Amateur radio — "ham" radio — meant a licensed call sign, the clipped discipline of the phonetic alphabet, and the small ceremony of the QSL card: an actual postcard that would arrive in the mail from a stranger on the far side of the world, sent to confirm that yes, on this frequency, at this hour, two people had met on the airwaves.

The lesson landed early and never left. Someone with the right gear could reach a stranger a continent away, and a real, physical card would come back to prove it — and there was already a whole worldwide fellowship of people who cared, deeply, about how a signal travels from here to there. Curiosity about the medium itself, and a global community reachable from a room in São Paulo — every later chapter is a variation on that first one, and on the man who showed it to him first.

The national micros

The first machine came home the same way the radio had: through his father. A nine-year-old Rodolfo would watch, rapt, as his father fed a program into the computer from an ordinary audio cassette and then made things happen on the screen of the television set — which, in that era, was the monitor every home micro borrowed from the living room. It looked like conjuring, and it was not long before the watching turned into doing.

The machine itself was a product of its moment. In 1984 Brazil was under the reserva de mercado, a market reserve that banned imported computers to shelter a domestic industry, so the machines were local clones — the first one here a Microdigital TK-82C, a Brazilian clone of Sinclair's ZX81, later joined by the TK90X, a clone of the ZX Spectrum 48K.

There was no hard drive and no network. Soon Rodolfo was writing his own programs in BASIC, typed by hand from the back pages of magazines and saved to that same screeching cassette; a membrane keyboard under his fingers, the television still standing in for a monitor. He learned BASIC because there was nothing else to do with the thing, and in the process learned the truth the rest of this site is built on: a computer is not magic. It is a machine that does exactly, and only, what you tell it.

The bulletin-board years

By 1991 the phone line had become the frontier. A bulletin board system — a BBS — was a computer in someone's bedroom with a modem answering a telephone. To visit one you told your own modem to dial its number, then listened to the two machines negotiate a connection in a burst of static that every modem owner could hum from memory.

One caller at a time. If someone else was already on, you got a busy signal and tried again later. Inside were message boards, libraries of files, screens drawn in colored ANSI text, and door games you played turn by turn against everyone else in town. Running one — the software here was Oblivion/2 — meant being host, moderator, and mechanic all at once.

And the boards were not islands. FidoNet stitched thousands of them together: in the small hours each board would dial its neighbors and hand off a sack of messages that then hopped, board to board, across the country and the world by morning. It was electronic mail before electronic mail — and it had exactly the shape the QSL cards had taught: a message finding a stranger, confirmed a little later.

The young hacker's way

If a BBS taught how the machines spoke to each other, phreaking asked a bolder question: how does the telephone system itself work — and can it be made to do things it was never meant to?

In Brazil the payphone was the orelhão, the "big ear," and it ran on fichas, little tokens you bought and fed into a slot. Schoolyard folklore held that a splash of water in the coin slot would short something inside and hand you a free dial tone; it was tried, more than once, and sometimes it worked. But the real doorway was the one the old legends described: a single tone — the famous 2600 Hz — that the long-distance network listened for as its own internal signal, and the blue box built to speak the network's language back to it.

That doorway got used, and often. A blue box could coax the network into handing over a long-distance trunk as if the call were its own, and the destination that mattered was Europe — the "scene" boards, the tight international circuit of crackers, artists, and traders whose bulletin boards were unreachable on any budget a teenager in São Paulo had. War-dialing mapped the quieter half of the network: a modem set loose to sweep whole ranges of numbers overnight and log what answered — a carrier, a fax, or the distinctive tone of a corporate PBX. Some of those PBXs could be talked into handing out an outside line.

Those were left alone, and the reason was the whole ethic in miniature. Seizing a trunk from the phone company's own signaling put the cost nowhere — no account, no invoice, no one billed. Making a real company's PBX place the call would have landed on that company's bill, and that was the line that stayed uncrossed. The one scheme that was only ever dreamed — a modem spliced straight into a payphone's wiring — stayed a dream. None of the rest was for money; it was the plain intoxication of understanding a system well enough to see its seams, and being young enough to lean on them. The analog network all of this lived on is decades gone now, its signaling tones long retired, which is the honest reason it can be set down here as history rather than instruction.

That one dream kept its own schedule. In the teenager's version it had a shape: a bulky 386DX40, a 14-inch CRT monitor, a modem, and a phone line — which is to say, access to the knowledge of the whole world, as long as the world stayed within reach of the desk. Seventeen years later, holding one of the first iPhones shortly after its launch — jailbroken so it could run the apps a community was building for itself — he felt it at once: the recurring dream of the fourteen-year-old of 1990, made real — and made portable, the whole of it now possible anywhere, in the palm of the hand.

The academic internet

The BBS world was a town. The internet was the planet. In 1991 it arrived through a university, over a modem, as a plain text prompt on a UNIX machine that was itself in conversation with thousands of others — no center, no owner, no closing time.

The account was a shell account — no SLIP or PPP carrying real internet traffic down the phone line, just a prompt and a menu of tools with strange names: Gopher, Archie, IRC. It was enough. The first time a command typed in São Paulo reached across and pulled a file off a machine on another continent, the walls of the dial-up garden simply fell away.

The door had a name, too: aandrade, an account on the UNIX servers of USP — the Universidade de São Paulo — whose access, as was the custom among enthusiasts then, was traded hand to hand like a key quietly copied for friends. Only years later did he learn how many of the people he had met in that era had stepped through the very same account. So, three decades late and with a grin: thank you, aandrade, for unknowingly holding open, for a whole generation of young explorers, one of the first doors to the world.

Then, in 1993, the shell account became a doorway of its own. On it he compiled a program that, when run, turned the dial-up session itself into a SLIP/PPP tunnel — the terminal line quietly becoming a real internet connection — and through that tunnel he opened NCSA Mosaic for his first glimpse of the World Wide Web. The shape of the next thirty years came into view all at once.

From hobby to trade

Somewhere in those same years the curiosity started to pay. From 1991 the work was hands-on and autonomous: importing components from the United States, assembling custom PCs and selling them, then installing and troubleshooting them for whoever needed help — DOS and CP/M, Turbo Pascal, and the Clipper and dBase databases that quietly ran small businesses then.

In 1995 it converged into a first formal role at INTELECTA, a company incubated by SEBRAE-SP. The project was an electronic-data-interchange system for trading medical and hospital supplies, built on Novell NetWare servers and the PCBoard bulletin-board system. A real system solving a real commercial problem — the exact point where the hobby, the trade, and the profession finally became a single thing.

That same year brought the era's other rite of passage: the bip. From 1995 or 1996 Rodolfo carried a Teletrim pager — first time in his life the world could find him while he moved through it. The protocol was gloriously manual: someone dialed the service, spoke their message to a human operator, and the operator transmitted the text to the destination's bip. Every callback number, every change of plans, every message not quite meant for third ears passed through a stranger's headset first. The operators of São Paulo must have heard so many things — and, one has to assume, kept most of them.