My infatuation with computers and technology in general began in 1998 after I graduated high school. My friend across the street had multiple computers at his house and we began playing a great game called Age of Empires. As a result, I wanted a PC of my own. So, when I graduated, that is what I bought with most of the gift money I received. It was a state-of-the-art AMD K6-2 300 MHz machine with a 4x CD burner and 6 GB hard drive. It was smoking! By November, I had a cable modem and I was on the ‘net high-speed style!
I discovered there was much more to computers than just gaming and I became obsessed with tearing apart the hardware and software of every PC I could get my hands on. Well, nine years later, I am still pretty much doing the same thing - only I get paid to do it now. I would put 1998/1999 as the time I really got into it though. I mean, that is when it was all brand new and exciting for me. Every reformat of my hard drive was an adventure. There were different operating systems to try: Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000 betas, BeOS and Linux. Everything technology was completely fascinating! I’d read everything within reach in an effort to learn as much as I could.
I was recently at my parents’ house and I discovered a few “old” magazines from 1999 and it was very interesting to look back on some of the hottest issues in tech from my “younger” days. There were great articles such as “Flat-Out Amazing” from the May 1999 issue of PC/Computing that marveled at the cheap ($3,199) 18″ 1,280×1,204 LCD flat panel displays. The same magazine sported a cautious review of the Sony HiFD “superfloppy” drive that could write to its own 200MB cartridges and the ubiquitous 1.44 MB floppies. It was a steal at only $199!
Their November issue had some great “Editor’s A-List Picks” as well. For web browsing, Internet Explorer 5.0 “doesn’t miss a trick.” Want a web server? “More stable than ever, Windows NT is the easiest way to set up a Web server.” He goes onto mention that it, of course, comes with Internet Information Server…“a winning combination.” For a national ISP, who could go wrong with Earthlink?
Finally, there are awesome advertisements for great products such as PC’s sporting 400MHz Celeron processors, 4.3GB hard drives and 32MB of SDRAM. Sweet!!!
I know many of you have been in technology a lot longer than I have, but for me, skimming through those old articles brought back a lot of memories…of fdisks, re-installing my OS and just exploring an exciting new world. It’s amazing how far things have come just since I’ve been involved. I can’t wait to see what we have at our disposal when I look back fondly at today’s technology and smile at how dated it all has become.
Technorati Tags: age of empires, amd, beos, celeron, computers, iis, intel, linux, obsolete, technology, windows
Oh, how I remember re-installing my OS…Those were the days. You should go talk to dad. The other day on the phone he slipped into a reminiscent version of “When I lived in Lakeland, I owned a house and my payment was only $209.” Of course, our father’s technologically speaking, the past nine years have brought our parents out of the “we just save everything on the desktop so that we know where it is” stage. I remember the days of starting up the computer only to find 472 icons for various word documents, web sites, and photographs.
Jordan
May 16th, 2007
My first experience with a computer was when I was in second grade. I went to a brand new elementary school in Enterprise, Alabama and they actually had a computer in the library. Students were allowed to share the computer during library time and play a game called Oregon Trail. This was around 1985. The computer was a Commodore 64.
My second experience with computers that began to pull me in the direction of my current career was around 1993 when I had a friend who owned a nice computer. Be it understood that at the time my family had a computer that was given to us by a friend. This computer in no way compared to my friend’s. His was an Aptiva. It was a multimedia machine and mine was a 386 running Windows 3.1. He had a game on his computer called Risk. I used to come home from school and go straight to his house to play against him (and lose).
Then, I started my “rage against the machine”. Around my freshman year of high school I began to experiment with computers. I took them apart and broke a few by accident. I learned how to take parts out and replace them. I learned how to upgrade and what each essential part of the computer did. I then learned how to be careful and thoughtful of what I was doing in a case. During this time I was introduced to the Hayes compatible modem (2400baud), BBS, Gopher, FTP, Internet, etc. It was all down hill from there.
Philip
May 17th, 2007