The Danger of Abstraction: Why Deep Technical Curiosity is Still an Engineer’s Best Asset

The year was 1997. A younger, spikey-haired version of myself was running a shiny AMD K6 processor on Debian 1.3 “Bo.” At the time, I was working at a German ISP doing UNIX System Administration. It was a trial by fire where I learned how practical networking functioned whilst supporting customers in two languages.

Flipping through an issue of Computer Shopper, I came across a DEC advertisement for their 500 MHz Alpha chip.