From floppy disk to autonomy — a working draft

This is an early excerpt from Ultimate Journey, releasing 1 September 2026.

I remember the weight of the floppy disk more than its contents. Three and a half inches of beige plastic, a metal shutter that clicked when you loaded it, and — somewhere on the magnetic surface — the first program I ever wrote that another human being used.

The country I grew up in was learning computers at the same time I was. There were no reference architectures for what a national telecommunications operator should look like in the early 2000s, no playbooks for building a road authority's information systems from scratch. We improvised, and the improvisation became infrastructure.

This book is about that improvisation — the systems, the people, and the long arc from a single floppy disk to the platforms that now run parts of a nation.