stayin' alive.

In the back row of an English class, around 1983, a boy stood to read his composition to the room. He was fourteen. He had called it Stayin' Alive with the g dropped, because that winter the Bee Gees were everywhere and the missing letter felt like his own. He cannot remember a single line of it now. He remembers that the teacher asked him to stand, that the room went quiet, and that for one page a boy who preferred silence held the whole class.

I was that boy. I have been trying to stay alive ever since. It took me forty-four years to see that I had named the thing before I had lived it.

I was not a hard luck child that year. I was fourteen and happy. My grades were good, the words came to me more easily than they came to the other boys, and life felt safe. And still, of all the things a content boy could have written about, I reached for staying alive. A boy who has everything does not usually make survival his subject. Perhaps it meant nothing. Perhaps some part of me knew more than I did. I cannot say.

This is the story of how I was made, from the first classroom to the last one I walked out of without a diploma. It is a story about school, and it is not really about school at all.

Here is what staying alive turned out to mean for me. It did not mean holding on. It meant starting over.

I have never been able to leave a thing alone and let it run. The moment something is built and steady, I feel the pull to take it apart and build the next one. New tool, new field, new country, new life. Reinvention was never a strategy. It was a reflex. Refusing to continue as I was has always been the deepest rule in me. The proof fills the rest of my life, the countries and careers that came later. These pages are about where it began.

Underneath it is the real engine, and the engine is learning. I need to be learning something or I do not feel alive. When I stop, I am either dead or hibernating. There is no third state.

The trouble is that the same engine that keeps me alive is the one that keeps me alone. I learned very early to want my freedom, to be most restless when things were most settled. Some of it is simply how I was made. I did not speak a full sentence until I was two and a half. Then they put me in a kindergarten and I began to talk at once, as if I had only been waiting for a reason. That was the engine, already running. Nothing settled could switch me on. Something new could. The family theory was that I never needed words. I got what I wanted by doing. I still talk less than most men, and I have always trusted action over speech and solitude over company. Staying alive, for me, was always a little like staying alone.

If you asked me for the truth of my life in one sentence, it would be this. I survived alone and I was carried the whole way. Both are true, and I have stopped trying to reconcile them.

I was sent to board when I was seven, partway through the second grade. It should read as a wound, a small child left at a dormitory on a Monday morning and not collected again until Friday. It was the opposite. It was the making of me.

On Friday afternoons I walked home close to two kilometres, carrying a black case of the week's clothes that was nearly as big as I was. Suitcases had no wheels in those years, so I carried the whole weight of it the whole way. It was the same unhurried talking walk I would keep taking all through school, and even loaded down like that, those Friday walks were among the happiest hours of my boyhood.

Here is the strange part, and it took me a lifetime to notice it. The friends I made in that dormitory, before I was ten years old, are the only friends from my whole education I still have. Half a century later they are still my closest. You do not choose your family and you do not choose who sleeps in the next bunk, and somehow those are the bonds that outlasted every one I chose for myself afterwards.

The teachers came in those same early years, and they came like a relay, each one handing me forward before I could drop. First there was Guner teacher, who had our class before Rumeysa. He was the first person who made me love mathematics and statistics, the recording and the analysing of the world, the habit of paying attention to more than the curriculum. He taught me that a system is a kind of mercy, that the world is less frightening once you can see how it is built. He is still alive, and still in my life, and that is its own kind of luck.

And there was Rumeysa teacher, who taught us English before English was on any curriculum, until somehow those classes were stopped, though by then it was in me and it never left. Once, when I was slipping and had failed, she gave me another chance at an exam I had no right to retake, and she called it trust. I studied, and I passed, and I understood for the first time that another person's belief in you is a thing that can be handed to you like an object. She is gone now. Rest in peace, Rumeysa teacher. A great deal of what I became, you started.

After the fifth grade the boarding years ended, and I went on to high school, six more grades at a private school in Erenkoy, close to home, about fifteen minutes on foot. I walked to it and back for years, a kilometre or two each way, and I have been a walker ever since. An English teacher there became my real mentor. A psychology teacher there would one day quietly save me, though I did not know it yet.

Here is the scene I have never told in public. In my last year I had a young teacher for Turkish literature who taught by the book and never once past it. I loved the history. The Ottoman verse was heavy with old languages and I could not love it. She did not know how to make it live for restless hearts. I was bored in a way that felt like suffocation.

So one day I did a stupid and deliberate thing. When she set a composition I wrote something naive and political and entirely beside the point, on purpose, to make her see me. She did not laugh. She went to the administration and asked them to punish me, and they telephoned my mother. I was the best student in that school and everyone knew it, everyone but her. She failed me into the autumn recovery exam.

And then my teachers closed ranks around me. Before the autumn exam they gave me their own time, extra lessons and extra patience, so that I would pass the literature paper. My psychology teacher most of all. I had not asked for any of it. They simply decided a boy should not fall over one composition. It allowed me to graduate. I have carried that kindness for forty years.

the system is real, and the system is not the whole story.

It taught me the same thing Guner teacher and Rumeysa teacher had each taught me in their own way. Now and then someone steps beyond the line drawn for them because they believe one failure is not the whole truth about you.

And yet I kept none of them. There was a friend in those years I was as close to as I have been to anyone. The day high school ended I let the thread drop, and years later, when I learned where he had ended up, I did not reach out. Not one friend from those six years is still in my life.

That is the other half of the truth, and I only saw it plainly at fifty-eight. Every teacher held me, and almost none of my equals stayed, everywhere except that first dormitory. The elders carried me forward and the friends at my own height fell away, and I have to be honest about my share of it. I did not lose them so much as I let them go.

i am not a man without people. i am a man who prefers to be alone.

That is the harder thing to admit, because I chose it, again and again, and it has made me sad as often as it has made me free.

I wanted one university, and I had wanted it since I was ten, from the wrong end of a failure.

In the fifth grade I sat the entrance exams of the foreign founded private schools, one by one, the way it was done then. Robert College was the hardest and I failed it badly. I sat for the French schools too, the ones my whole family belonged to and I did not, because everyone in my house had been raised in French and I was the one who had not learned it, the odd head at the table. I failed those as well. One relative offered to pay a donation that would have lifted me off a waiting list and put me in. My mother refused. She said I had not earned it, and I should not go anywhere I had not won on my own. I did not understand her then. I have believed in her rule ever since, even when I have not managed to live up to it.

In my grandfather's library there was a book about Robert College and Bogazici University, their history and their halls and everything they could make of a person. I read it the way other boys read adventure stories. The place that had turned me away became the place I decided to reach.

So I gave two years to it. Every weekend of grades ten and eleven, most of the holidays other boys spent resting, I crossed the city before dawn from Erenkoy to Besiktas for exam preparation, a long cold journey in the dark. I sat the national university exam two years running. And I won. The letter came from the government examination board, and I had my one university, the first choice on a list an uncle had ordered for me, with only two conditions of my own on it. Put Bogazici at the top. And no medical school, because I had no wish to spend my life looking at blood.

On registration day I stood in the office alone. Around me other students had come with their parents. I remember one boy in a bow tie and a jacket beside his mother and father, who turned out later to be a quiet genius, a double major in electronics and physics at once. No one had come with me, and I felt no lack in it. I loved the place on sight, and I was proud, and I was not afraid of anything. I did not yet know it was the one thing I would start and never finish.

I began with a small act of sabotage against myself. There was an English proficiency exam that, if you passed it, sent you straight into your engineering classes. My English was easily good enough to pass. I failed it on purpose, to buy myself one gentle year inside the university before the real work began. It was the greatest mistake of my education, or the greatest gift, and to this day I cannot tell you which.

Because in that gentle year I found the computers.

I still remember the prompt. A dark screen, a single word waiting.

I fell in love the way you only fall once, completely and without a plan. A professor let me onto the university machines while I was still only a language student with no right to them. I taught myself one programming language, then another, then every one I could reach. Before long I wrote my first real program, a stock control system for a furniture shop where an uncle kept the books. I built it for nothing and they used it for years. I had found the thing I would stay alive for, and it asked for all of me, and I gave it all of me.

I gave it so completely that everything else went quiet. I stopped going to lectures. When my engineering classes finally began in the second year, the muscle I had built for mathematics and physics and chemistry had wasted away, and worse, the appetite for them was gone. I could pass technical drawing and programming without effort, I could even teach the other students those, but the sciences I simply failed, one exam after another. I had no friends in my own department. My friends were all in the computer centre. Two repeats later, at the end of that year, I was dropped from Industrial Engineering.

To stay in the university I transferred into a programme in electrical and electronics that lasted two years. I meant it as a bridge to biomedical engineering. What pulled me was the machines that listen to the body, and above all the ones that listen to the brain and its waves. I sat in the biomedical classes of the master's students for the love of it. Forty years later that pull has never let go. I still read brain computer interface research the way other men read the sports pages. But I barely attended my own programme. I failed most of it and was dropped for good in the third semester. Two years in one department, a year and a half in another, and the gentle year before them both. Five years inside the university, and no diploma at the end of any of it.

on paper i was a double failure. i had never in my life been more alive.

Because while the classrooms were losing me, the computer centre was becoming mine. I had learned the whole system, including the corners of it I was not meant to reach. I taught myself past every locked door, and one day, doing something careless, I was caught. I had signed into the administrator's account while the administrator was sitting at the console and could see exactly what I was doing.

The director of the computer centre came and found me at the terminal and asked me to talk. I had broken nothing and taken nothing. But I had crossed a line, and we both knew it. He sat me down and asked what I had been doing in that room for two years, and I told him the truth, all of it. He listened. And then, instead of closing the door on me, he opened it wider. He gave me a desk, a share of a room with a window, and the responsibility of looking after the machine I loved. He turned a boy who was failing every exam into someone the whole faculty could rely on.

I have honoured many teachers in these pages, and I owe him the most of all of them. The director of the centre saw what I was before I could have told him, and he built me a place to be it. I cannot pay that back.

From nine in the morning until the system shut down at eleven at night, I was there. I became the one who kept everything running, the one the professors and the master's students came to, the one trusted with the network itself. They made me the node administrator for the university on EARN, the academic network that was our early window onto the wider world. In that role I travelled to the other universities and met the people who ran their nodes, in Istanbul and Ankara and out across the country. Through the small services I built and hosted, my name travelled further than I had. I was proud, I was successful, I was connected to everyone, and I was failing every course I was enrolled in, all at the same time.

The machine had names and I still keep them. A CDC Cyber mainframe first, white phosphor on black, and later a DEC VAX with amber terminals, the same amber this page wears. Our node was called TRBOUN. The whole university reached the world through one dial-up link across the city to the node at Yildiz, nine thousand six hundred baud when it held. It did not always hold. When the line dropped, the mail and the messages and the files of the entire university piled up in a queue behind it, and our window to the world stayed shut until someone brought the link back. That someone was me. I chased the fault with the telephone company and with the men who ran the far end until the link came up and the queue began to drain. Some weeks later it would drop again and I would do it again. Nobody had assigned me the queue. It was mine because I could not stand to see it stopped.

People ask what I studied at that university. The honest answer is the computer centre. Between seventeen and twenty-two those rooms taught me more than any curriculum could have held. Programming for science and programming for commerce. Programming for AI in LISP and Prolog, forty years before the whole world learned the word. The seven layers of a network. How systems fail and how they are brought back. Backup and resiliency. I even taught myself SPSS, the statistics tool of the social sciences, and helped push many master's theses over the line, none of them mine.

The rooms taught me people too. I learnt to hold a community together before I knew there was a word for it. The trust of professors and assistants across every faculty was a currency, and I was learning how it is earned. I stood inside the founding of a countrywide UNIX user group and watched a community being built from nothing. I worked on joint projects with academics from Connecticut and Seattle in the United States to Acadia in Canada to Switzerland, a boy from Erenkoy in correspondence with the world. And it was there I earned my first project money. I bought my first pair of winter boots with it. My own money. My own boots. I have bought better things since. Nothing has ever felt like those boots.

There is one thing about those years I still cannot explain. I do not remember my family ever once asking me how my studies were going. They knew I had failed, and they knew I had somehow become the keeper of the university's computers, and no one ever sat me down about either. Perhaps I was hiding. Perhaps the house had simply learned not to ask. I have wondered about it my whole life.

The machine did not only take my degree. It gave me the next forty years in exchange.

The same appetite that made me fail every exam is the one that had already made me who I would be. A friend, a mentor, a bigger brother pulled me into the world of UNIX, sat me in front of my first serious systems, and put me, for the first time in my life, on an aeroplane, a short flight south to keep a distant machine talking to ours back home. I still remember that flight.

And the last door, the one that mattered most, was opened by the same director who had caught me at the terminal. He put my name forward, and it carried me out of the university and into Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC. My first real company, and to this day the one I respect most. Not for the name on the building. For the people inside it. The angel sisters who covered for a young man finding his feet. The mentors beyond counting who guide me still, in the harshest game ever designed. Life. I gave it four years then, and when the road brought me back I stayed seven more. Eleven years under three names, as the mergers rolled one company into the next. The names on the door changed. The people did not. Same mentors, same elders, same friends, a lifetime of happiness and success in one memory. The rest of that story is for another day.

So I left with no diploma. Two dropouts in five years, and every locked door in that building come open for me. I did not finish the one thing I had fought two years to begin. I was made in those rooms, by the people who carried me and the machine that claimed me, and then I walked out of them the way I have walked out of everything since, forward, toward the next thing, already learning it.

I never learned to stay. I learned to start over, which is a different skill and a lonelier one. So it surprises me that the newest thing I am learning, at fifty-eight, is how to look back.

A man who stays alive by always moving forward does not, as a rule, write about his own past. Doing it feels a little like the end. Then I decided it was not the end at all. It is only the appetite turned, for once, on myself. One more thing to learn.

My sons, you have not read a word of this, and that is all right. A legacy is not read on the day it is written. It is read on the day it is needed. I am leaving the truth your father actually lived, so that one day, when you go looking for the whole man and not only the one you remember, he will be here on the page at full height.

I was carried by everyone who taught me, and I kept almost no one my own age. The teachers, the mentors, the friends from that first dormitory, they are the sculptors of me. There would be others later, the ones who saved me again and again in the years this story has not yet reached, and they will have their page. Keep your people better than I kept mine.

I named this Stayin' Alive when I was a boy of fourteen who did not know what he was naming. I know now. It means you keep starting over. It means you let the people who love you carry you, and you try, late and imperfectly, to carry someone back. And it means that when the screen goes black and asks whether you want to return to the start, you say yes.

i always have. i always will.

Ferhat Dilman spent four decades in enterprise technology at Digital, Compaq, HP, Microsoft and Oracle. He writes at dilman.tech. This is transmission #003 of the life thread, a memoir written for his sons.

These pages are built from his own words. Ferhat drafts first. Claude (Anthropic) interviews him one question at a time, assembles each page from his own sentences, checks what can be checked and cuts what runs long. The memories, the people and the judgments are his alone.

And these are recollections, not records. He writes them decades after the fact. Where memory fails he says so on the page instead of filling the gap. The rest stands as he remembers it.