I bought my first PC in 1996 at 13 years old. Used my confirmation money on it. AMD K6 (or K6-II? Been a while) @ 200MHz, I don’t even remember how much ram just that my drive was 3 GB and I had a 2 or 4 MB Matrox 2D card. Learning how that computer worked was simple because: Big brick inside = Hard drive. Big green plate = motherboard. Small green plate attached to it = graphics card, and then CPU and RAM of course. Then came the Voodoo cards, and man, I was just at the right place at right time in history to enjoy the explosion of 3D hardwave accelerated gaming on PC. My little brother’s first PC had a Voodoo Banshee though which made me mighty jealous. I still remember how smooth Quake 2 ran on that beast.
Seeing how things evolved from DOS to Windows and the hardware as well, and having to reinstall windows quarterly because of sketchy stuff from astalavista.box.sk that made me pretty much the IT guy on our household.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. The school system was horribly unprepared for the future, and if our places of education even had computers they were horribly outdated. The college I attended had thin clients connected to some server in the basement and it was just too slow. Took like 5 minutes to boot up Word. Programming lessons? Ha!
And if you did make it somewhat into IT you had to find an apprentice spot at a company inbetween school periods, and there was just too few places that took apprentices.
I bought my first PC in 1996 at 13 years old. Used my confirmation money on it. AMD K6 (or K6-II? Been a while) @ 200MHz, I don’t even remember how much ram just that my drive was 3 GB and I had a 2 or 4 MB Matrox 2D card. Learning how that computer worked was simple because: Big brick inside = Hard drive. Big green plate = motherboard. Small green plate attached to it = graphics card, and then CPU and RAM of course. Then came the Voodoo cards, and man, I was just at the right place at right time in history to enjoy the explosion of 3D hardwave accelerated gaming on PC. My little brother’s first PC had a Voodoo Banshee though which made me mighty jealous. I still remember how smooth Quake 2 ran on that beast.
Seeing how things evolved from DOS to Windows and the hardware as well, and having to reinstall windows quarterly because of sketchy stuff from astalavista.box.sk that made me pretty much the IT guy on our household.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. The school system was horribly unprepared for the future, and if our places of education even had computers they were horribly outdated. The college I attended had thin clients connected to some server in the basement and it was just too slow. Took like 5 minutes to boot up Word. Programming lessons? Ha!
And if you did make it somewhat into IT you had to find an apprentice spot at a company inbetween school periods, and there was just too few places that took apprentices.