Robert Wright

When I was growing up, my father, Bob Wright, ran a online community and resource hub called FreePCTech.com along with the mailing lists PCSOFT and PCBuild. He was an avid technologist with a mind to what PCs could do. In many ways, my childhood home was a place of technology exploration and he shared one of his passions with me as I grew up – a love of computers and technology.

It was through my dad’s business partner, Drew Dunn, that I first encountered Linux. Specifically Red Hat Linux (someone once told me as a joke – you don’t choose your distro, it chooses you). My dad and I would sit at his office area in our house, burning and labeling media his organization made available for purchase to folks who couldn’t download OS ISOs (back in the days when bandwidth was expensive!).

I remember in my pre-teens, struggling the first time I tried to install a Linux distribution. I kept getting stuck on partitioning screen in Anaconda trying to get it to install and not understanding anything about the concept of swap space and why or how to partition my disk properly – having never seen anything like this before on a Windows machine where I had been coming from! After a few attempts, Drew and my dad stepped in, patiently explaining to me what Swap was, and why I even needed it to install it. I got it to work – and I started on a longer journey from desktop environments, to browsers, and even remember the launch of Mozilla Firefox!

Although my life eventually led me away from the days of burning Linux disks and helping my dad with FreePCTech, the lessons I absorbed then remained at the core of how I approached technology. Those early encounters taught me that curiosity, collaboration, and an open mind are fundamental. And while my dad and I didn’t always see eye to eye—he helped show me a path that I would continue to walk for years to come. I continue to be grateful for FreePCTech setting such a strong foundation for me.