There was a day, past the dawn of modernity but before the dusk of the electron, when dusty haired miscreants gathered around glowing tubes, spinning dials to tune into the tales of tricks they could never turn. Stuffed under pillows, hidden under covers and only as loud as they could dare, some person beamed a story told through song that they conceived for an audience they couldn’t measure and could only hear one voice at a time, over a telephone.

Some lonely person impossibly far away on the late, late shift was slinging records that maybe a dozen people in their listening audience cared to hear. You have to be a certain age to have the experience of learning the personality of a disc jockey, for that time has thoroughly, perhaps blessfully, expired. You would tune in on the regular, learning through the timbre of the patter and the rhythm of the beat selection who the mysterious man on that radio was. Rolling in the lower-mid spectrum offered by amplitude modulation was the only DJ I thought my Biblebelt upbringing would levy permissible.

He spun what he called the “Goldie oldies” and truthfully his name escapes me. Like the best on-air personalities, his was demonstrated through the three hours of music he spun each week. They would be a combination of the doo-wop hits that filled civic auditoriums two generations before I was born and the sometimes tragic imitations that passed on the late 80’s Billboard. I was 9, maybe 10, petrified of being discovered listening to rock and roll. I’d duck out of Full House early and before America’s Funniest Home Videos to catch the first hour, because that hour is when he did his best work.

Out of the single shift he had a week, the opening 60 minutes was when he did the Lord’s work. On a dial filled with hair metal and Debbie Gibson on one end and Merle Haggard and racism on the other, he was the only person on all of Tesla’s invention in this corner of Kansas who wanted to make people boogie out of their britches. That first hour he did his damnedest to get people out of their seats and out of the minds they inhabited Monday through Saturday. He was aiming to remind people there was a heart in Nashville, a soul in Detroit and a mind to get you dancing naughty with whats-her-name at the sock hop in the VFW hall. It was Beach Boys and Chuck Berry, The Valiants and The Del-Vikings, and everybody that wasn’t the fucking Beatles.

His first hour was a manifesto - he was trying to declare that what you knew about rock and roll was wrong and that he was right. Led Zeppelin wasn’t the groove you were supposed to hear first. Elvis Presley didn’t write “Blue Suede Shoes.” Columbus didn’t discover America. What you knew about the music and the country you loved was a lie and before the grandmothers tuned in after bingo he wanted to make sure you knew that. He’d shamelessly shout that Dick Dale was louder than Eddie Van Halen and the baritone from The Platters could break a plate on Jim Morrison’s trachea. He made the case at 45 revolutions per minute that you better listen for 120 minutes more.

Maybe listening to those shows every week was why I started working on the Internet. The romantic notion that some kid, somewhere adjusts his or her path by virtue of a well placed needle gliding over a plane. Isn’t that the ambition of every programmer? Maybe, just maybe, this line of code I write will end up impacting someone in Pakistan the way a Sun single shook me at the same age. Will she end up in a similar place twenty years later? Isn’t that possibility worth making sure that line is right?

The reason I cut code on this Internet is because I want to shake you the same way I shook hiding a radio under my sheets. If you are a developer right now, you are the DJ for the generation that follows you. If we can place the same consideration and care into the bits we put over the wire as that unnamed, influential record slinger I remember, the tradition will live past the medium that bore us.

Thanks for listening to me on the radio we make together.