computer geek - 80s Commodore 64 - hackers (1995) - modems - dsl - netflix
computer geek - Commodore 64 - hackers (1995) - modems
Commmodore 64
I think the 1st time I really wanted a personal computer of my own was in high school, in the 80s.
A classmate/friend, RLV, had a Commodore 64, and I went to their house to hang out, and play on it with them.
I remember it had a cassette drive, and to play the C64 version of monopoly, you'd tell the PC to load from the cassette player, go watch TV, and about 30min later the program would have finished being read from cassette, be loaded into RAM, and ready to play.
My first computer
I did not get my own personal computer, PC, until I had graduated high school.
It was a Zeos 386DX 33Mhz, 4Mb of RAM, and a 130Mb hard drive. The operatng system it came with was DOS5. It cost me US$3000, and I bought with money I had saved up from going-to-school minimum-wage jobs.
I remember upgrading the RAM from 4Mb to 8Mb. The RAM sticks cost US$50 per 1Mb back then, so was US$200 to double my ram to 8Mb, so I could learn/run DOS Autocad v10.
I also had to purchase a math coprocessor, a 387 chip, to run Autocad. Purchased a Cyrix 387 chip. Cost was about US$200 back then.
My first self-built computer
Eventually the 386 PC was just too slow. It could not really effectively run any PC Games, and rendering even a simple 3D Autocad cube took 30min!
Saved up my money, then eventually went to PC Club, after reading lots of reviews of PC Hardware in the Computer Shopper magazine.
Purchased an ASUS motherboard that could run the AMD DX4 CPU that I also purchased (as Pentiums were too expensive, and the Pentium90 CPU math bug scandal had just happened).
I even tried OS/2 Warp on it, as the M$ antitrust scandal made me not want to run Windows. That lasted maybe a year. There just were no applications, and Wordperfect had trouble running on Warp.
Hackers (1995)
Once I saw the movie Hackers, it made me want to be a computer programmer / hacker.
I went back to college, with my major now being to Computer Science.
For learning assembly/C/C++ bought my 1st boxed compiler software. Borland Tasm/C/C++, with about ten pounds of manuals, and it came with WindowsNT! Ran that for about a year, to do assembly/C programming classes. It seemed "neat!" at the time, in NT, if a program crashed, the OS rarely went "blue screen", but that NT would say a program crashed, but NT itself seemed more stable.
My first Linux computer
Around Junior year in college of my ComputerScience major, the classes were now using Linux as the operating system, to learning things like Database Fundamentals, Operating Systems, and such. Those class introduced the "fork()" *nix system call, and such, and the on-campus computer labs were always full, and it was hard to get computer time in school labs as a student that also worked.
Around the Year2000, went back to computer hardware store (cannot remember if it was Fry's Electronics in Burbank, the one that had the UFOs a la Mars Attacks or PC Club), and purchased another ASUS motherboard, and an AMD Firebird 700MHz CPU. Bought three 256Mb RAM sticks, for 768Mb of RAM. Also bought RedHat linux, CDROM + manual in-a-box! from my local CompUSA store.
Also bought a US Robotics 14.4k speedmodem, that worked with Linux (not a winmodem!). Used it for dialup internet from my 1st internet dialup provider, Netcom. Also the modem was a fax modem, so could fax my resume for jobs!
I could now also use my home Linux PC to do school work, and connect to the school via telnet (ssh wasn't a thing yet) via dialup and use my own PC for classwork, and not have to use the on-campus computer labs.
Some time in the early 2000's I think I switched to Earthlink dialup.
DSL
Many years later, my first broadband internet, via ATT and a DSL modem. It had a blazing 1Mbs. Then got my 1st wi-fi box, a Netgear, so I could do internet via DSL via wifi. I would connect my PC via ethernet cable to the Netgear box, as it was close to my desk.
Netflix
With DSL a person could stream Netflix! And we did! The streaming would work just fine, as long as no one else was using any of the house DSL bandwidth. If others were online too, then the dreaded horizontal red bar of "loading", and if bad enough, I'd have to give up on watching a show via streaming for a while.
I did not watch Netflix on a PC. Instead we had a CD/DVD/Plus player, that when you connected an ethernet cable to it, could run Netflix.