Right, and then ran some community college for a while.

No, he was editor in a national newspaper when he started his PhD study. Then, after completing, he went back to the press, still working as a deputy editor‑in‑chief for many years, and then retired.

That’s what he has immediate access to, but also via correspondence, I’m sure.

In Tiananmen.

That’s right.

And his research subjects.

It’s a common thread of discussion, but I can’t pinpoint which sentence brought me aware that there is a personal computing thing.

They’re also part of this research network. They also share the lack of information access when they were pursuing their studies in China, and then the wealth of access that’s just booming via their university networks.

Also, because many of those are students, they were university students during the protest, so they still pursue their original degrees in mathematics, and science, and so on.

For example? Personally, I’m more acquainted with, say, @FengCongde’s work . There’s some extended network where they communicated over this thing that I was aware of, but haven’t used, myself. Like Internet, obviously, [laughs] but that I haven’t accessed at the time.

Around ’91, and then I went there around ’92. He’s already established a network of friends, both German friends, and also fellow Tiananmen protesters. Many of them...

’92. He went to Germany one year before me.

Yeah, and people fled to Europe around ’90 or ’91. It was this rescue.

It was that year.

Right, because at the living room, which is my father’s main work field of study, he would interview the exiles, the people who fled Beijing after the Tiananmen protest. That was his subject of his PhD thesis, the dynamics of student movement in Tiananmen.

Around hardware hacking,

Yeah, it’s a satellite city.

In Dudweiler.

Yeah, studying...

In politics.

’94.

Then I started learning the usual tools, Archie, Finger, FTP, things like that. Then, when the World Wide Web became available, I switched to the World Wide Web. Before that I was also into Gopher for a while.

By late ’93 I was given a dial‑up to Internet via the National Taiwan University network. Still using the same modem, I’m now, then, able to dial into the Internet.

That gave me access to the Jargon File and to Eric Raymond’s work, and to the early discussions around object‑oriented programming, which happens mostly on Usenet groups. Then I started reading Usenet.

People would dedicate one phone line to host a local bulletin board system for their neighbors to dial in and share software, and share posts, and so on. I learned about the UUCP network, which is a pre‑Internet Internet, that way, in the bulletin board systems.

Baud. B‑A‑U‑D. It was considered fast at the time, and then 2,400 for a while, and then 56k. That was the three modems I owned. Then everybody switched to ADSL. I started when modem become available, but not the general World Wide Web. I bought a modem mostly to dial ...

It’s more of personal computer hardware, this kind of hacking. I wasn’t very much into it. I was just aware of its existence. I went into the local bulletin board systems team when I was back in Taiwan, and that was in ’93. I bought them up then. I think ...

My dad of course being a PhD student, had access to the university network and so on. The World Wide Web wasn’t implemented back then, because it was ’92. Tim Berners‑Lee was still busily inventing the World Wide Web. I didn’t have this idea of a web‑based hacking culture. Not ...

Basically I spent the year when I was 11 there, and went back when I was 12. During my time in Germany, there’s already a culture around the Saarbrücken University where people would share information about personal computers and so on. Personal computers were already quite advanced at the time.

I read about it I think first when I was in Germany actually. I stay in Germany for a year, and I was 11 at the time. At the time there was already...

With the community?

...between learning programming and having a personal computer. They both happened when I was eight.

Around maybe the second semester when I was eight. At most just six months, maybe less...

Yeah. And then I learnt also Logo which is not quite a general purpose programming language, but a very good educational language. Those are the two main languages that I learnt. Then later on I would learn Perl around 13 or 14, and switched to that as my permanent language.

BASIC, because that’s built in.

I wrote a graphics program that teaches fractions, again basically that teaches fractions basically for my younger brother who was four at the time.

Later on after doing this for quite a while, my parents decided to anyway buy me a computer, a personal computer. I started programming, and of course finding a lot of limitations in the hardware. Still it behaves much as I had predicted. I used computer as basically just a ...

Later on I would learn that Richard Stallman learned computing the same way, without access to a computer, with pencil and paper. I really do think that it teaches programming in a way that brings out the imagination, instead of being limited by the then very limited hardware.

Yeah. Pencil and paper.

No, it’s just paper.

I think that’s really my introduction to hacking, is just seeing it as a machine that does mathematics, and not something that’s dependent on any particular hardware. It’s the way they’re thinking.

I do have access to programming books, so I just took a piece of paper and drew some keyboard, and started programming by writing the responses that according to the book the computer will respond. I would write CLS and enter, and then click those paper keys and then erase ...

’81. The thing is that not many people at the time have personal computers. It’s expensive. They were just introduced basically in Taiwan. A lot of them are manufactured in Taiwan as IBM PC clones, as they are called. There’s a lot of hobbyists interested at the time, but not ...

It started when I was eight. I was already very much into mathematics. I saw some books from, probably, my uncles that describes this programming language called BASIC. I don’t have a computer at that time. It was the year of personal computer, around ’88. ’89.

Of course. We’re posting the transcripts on the Internet. [laughs]

Even more mainstream.

Yeah.

That’s my weekend report. How’s yours?

I bought some cleaning powder and quite a few drinks, tea, to make it up to 500. It’s questionable whether this actually promotes tourism.

As soon as I bring out the card, the person, the staff, at the counter said, "Oh, you have to buy more than NT500 in order to use that card, which probably they wouldn’t say to any other tourist with any other card. Then I asked a little bit about ...