When I was a kid in Johannesburg, my grandma worked for CNA — Central News Agency. They were the big company that brought overseas magazines into South Africa. Imagine shelves stacked with glossy covers of Mad, PC World, or National Geographic, all wrapped in shiny plastic.
Now here’s the quirky part: when magazines didn’t sell, the shop didn’t send the whole thing back. Nope. They just tore off the front cover — literally ripping the face off the magazine — and sent that back to CNA. The rest of the magazine, sometimes with cool freebies inside, was left behind for the store to throw away.
To most people, that was trash. To me, it was treasure.
Fast forward to 1985 in Windhoek. I remembered the trick. One day, I explained it to an older shop assistant: “You know, they only count the covers. The rest doesn’t matter.” She smiled, and from then on, she kept the whole magazine for me — plus the floppy disks that sometimes came tucked inside.
Think about it: you’re 15 years old, and suddenly you’ve got a stack of magazines full of stories, games, and tech tips, plus floppy disks that could actually run programs on a computer. It felt like finding cheat codes in real life.
That’s how my ICT journey began. Not with fancy new computers or expensive lessons, but with a quirky loophole in the system. I was “hacking” before I even knew what hacking meant — not breaking rules, just spotting the gaps and using them to learn.
Looking back, I realize those torn covers were more than scraps of paper. They were tickets into a world of technology, curiosity, and discovery. And all because CNA had a system that cared about covers, not content.
