How Two Words Literally Changed My Life

Have you heard of the Butterfly effect? In short, it’s the hypothesis that something small and seemingly unimportant can, through an unforseen chain of events, have a massive impact somewhere else. This effect is real; I know, because it’s happened to me. Come with me as I regale you with the tale of two words that forever changed my life for the better.

When I was in college studying computer science in the mid 1990’s, my friends and I spent a considerable amount of time in the school’s computer labs. Home internet was expensive in those days, and after six p.m. we were allowed to play games there. A lot of time was spent advancing through the levels as players on MUDs — the text-based precursors to graphical MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and conquering space in the team-based Netrek game inspired by Star Trek. And I’m pretty sure we occasionally did some actual school work in between games as well, but I’ll be damned if I remember any of it. Incidentally, I once won the European Netrek League with my team Chainsaw Hamsters, where I played using the name Roadkill Hamster. This was long before anyone had ever heard to word “e-sports”. But that’s totally besides the point of this story.

One day, as I was sitting in the SunOS computer lab, I heard someone behind me say, “Have you tried changing the startup sequence?”. This immediately piqued my interest, since “startup-sequence” was the name of a specific file on Amigas — a particular type of computer which was dying at the time, but had been my main computer for…