Clicks and Whirs

I remember back during freshman year in college one night when Monk and I were trying to get to sleep. Monk had put a version of Red Hat on a commodity Packard Bell PC he owned and kept it under his bed. I had not yet learned how to hear the secret code of hard drives, so I wasn't sure why Monk had sat up suddenly, looking both confused and a little nervous.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"My Linux box. It just wrote something to disk," he explained.

"Yeah? So?" I wondered.

"So it's not supposed to," he stressed.

This simple exchange had a profound impact on me. I hadn't learned the fundamentals of stateful firewalling yet. I'd never configured Apache or OpenSSH. My background was filled by DOS and Windows, both operating systems that swapped things to disk all the damn time and never once checked with the user to see if it was OK. They just did. It was just an accepted background function, the price paid for using your computer to, you know, compute things.

That night, what Monk's 1 AM bout of concern showed me was that computers exist that do what their owners tell them. Implicitly. Linux, and then BSD, would begin to reveal a comprehensive philosophy of simplicity to me, one that not only does not require the hard drive to defragment itself in the middle of the night, but that furthermore does not require the hard drive to be defragmented whatsoever. It's a matter of control, of being able to say "I will dictate when and how bytes are written to disk." I envied him in his absolute control over that Linux box.

Now I own an old Pentium with a bunch of noisy IDE hard drives in it. I use it, among other things, as a sort of reverse alarm clock: it runs a daily security script every morning at 1:30 AM and when the disks start grinding and crunching, I know that I should get to bed soon.