front matter
preface
I’m scavenging through shelves of discarded hardware in the basement of the old government building, when a pair of sturdy-looking hard drives catch my attention. The year is 2002, and I’m 19 years old and working my first job as a help desk technician at a French tax-collection agency. My boss almost apologizes when she asks me to clean up the basement, thinking I’ll loathe the assignment, but I feel like Ali Baba when he first entered the magical cave. So many old servers, sitting there unused but still ready to run UNIX systems I’ve never heard of, let alone played with. If my apartment were bigger than a single bedroom and a tiny kitchen, I’d take it all and run a huge network at home!
The two hard drives are 15,000 RPM ...
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