I wrote the textbook on hardware

1 min read

At the time, I worked for a company in Norway that I had co-founded a few years earlier. I wrote software, both commercial and free (including a commercial firewall), maintained a number of Linux servers for customers, went on-site to train employees in IT security, and handled various other IT-related tasks. I even did some sales and marketing.

One day, one of our customers reached out and asked if we knew anyone who could write a book about hardware and operating systems. The book was required in higher education to train IT technicians and other professionals who needed a deeper understanding of the technology, but not quite at the university level. We knew no such person, and neither did anyone else. Eventually, I saw it as a challenge and volunteered, on the condition that my compensation would be paid in full to a home for orphaned children in Brazil.

It turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated, but after a little too many months, I finished the section about hardware. Another author they worked with had a manuscript about operating systems in progress, so the two manuscripts became the new textbook.

I had almost forgotten about this until a week ago, when I had a discussion with a friend in Bulgaria about technology. He wanted to run an Android game on a mini-PC with an Intel i5 CPU running Linux. He tried to download the .apk from the Play Store, but the computer refused to do anything with it. So I explained that Android games don’t run on PCs (well, you can use an emulator, but the game wouldn’t perform very well on that hardware configuration). He claimed that it should work and that “everybody” did it. So I asked him: who do you think knows more about this topic - me, who wrote the textbook about hardware, or “everybody” in the village? I pulled out the book from my bookshelf and kind of settled the discussion.