My First Computer
Compared to most of the people we knew, my family got our first computer pretty late in the game. It was sometime in 1995, and our first try was a Packard Bell. It was a real steaming pile of garbage, and got returned in pretty short order.
We ended up getting (and keeping) a Windows 95 tower put out by DEC, which was a very solid machine, if memory serves.
Anyways, I always found myself tinkering in the control panel. For some reason I found that more interesting than most of the other things you could do on a PC. Mostly basic things like changing the wallpapers and themes… stuff like that. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be using the computer for, so experimenting with settings became my thing.
My dad would get very upset that every time he would sit down to the computer, it would look different. He didn’t appreciate that kind of variability in his life, so he told me if I wanted to do stuff like that I had to get my own computer.
I was a tinkerer at heart, so I had to solve this problem. Once I turned 16, I got a job at Office Max and started saving my money. I bought Computer Shopper magazine and voraciously read everything I could get my hands on about computers. The PC market was very competitive at this time, with companies like Gateway and Dell competing with the other brands that were sold in the retail chains. Additionally, there were hundreds of mail-order component sellers. I gradually started to understand what was a good value and what wasn’t, and back then you could save a few bucks if you bought the components and assembled a PC yourself. So that’s what I set out to do.
My PC was assembled from a carefully curated list of components that gave me the best balance of performance and cost. For example, I chose a 100MHz Pentium processor, because it was inexpensive compared to the others, but still allowed me to use the 66MHz bus with a 1.5x multiplier, whereas if I was running the 120MHz CPU, I would pay a lot more money and be running on a slower 60MHz bus. Not optimal!
Other specs:
- Supermicro P5STE motherboard (how I remember this is beyond comprehension!)
- 16MB RAM
- 1 GB Western Digital hard drive
- Toshiba OEM CD-ROM Drive (4X!)
- Creative Sound Blaster sound card (ISA)
- US Robotics 56k internal modem (nothing but the best!)
- Of course, a 3.5" floppy drive
- I was able to get a hand-me-down 14" CRT monitor to hold me over until I could get something better
I got all this stuff in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. I waited until I had enough money to order everything, because prices only went down, and I didn’t want my equipment depreciating while I earned enough to order the next component. However, since I ordered items from several different outlets, depending on who had the best prices, it arrived on a staggered schedule. I will tell you, the anticipation as I waited for my stuff to arrive was heavy!
Once I had everything, I had an interesting challenge. I had to get everything assembled and working, and I had absolutely zero experience doing such a thing! Also, this was the very early days of “plug and play”, and it would have more appropriately been called “plug and pray”. I followed the basic procedure of assembling the necessary core components (CPU, RAM, HDD, floppy, CD-ROM), then installing Windows 95 from the 13 installation floppies, then trying to get the remaining things working.
I don’t remember exactly how long this whole project took, but it definitely ran over the course of a few days, with a handful of do-overs. I distinctly recall the feeling when something wouldn’t be working correctly and the fear would start creeping in. “Did I break it? Did I accidentally fry this thing with an inadvertent electrostatic discharge? Is that why it won’t work even after I followed the driver installation instructions 18 times?” You see, if you read anything about assembling computers in the 90’s, there would be warnings plastered all over it about ESD. It was worse than AIDS for your computer. Every component came in a shimmering static-proof bag with big yellow labels on it, warning you to discharge yourself before attempting to touch the contents. (This is interesting, because over the years I’ve built and repaired dozens if not hundreds of computers, and I’ve never once seen or heard of a real-life face-to-face case where a person touched a PC component and rendered it useless with a static shock. A bunch of fear-mongering if you ask me.)
These were nerve-wracking moments. At 16-years-old, I had hundreds of dollars worth of blood, sweat, and tears wrapped up in this project. The notion that I might fail to get this thing up and running was hanging over me at every moment. I was in deep!
Looking back, it was somewhat audacious of me to think I could buy all this stuff and then just figure out how to put it together and make it work with nothing but access to the 1996 web and some computer magazines. I need to give credit to my grandfather for my confidence. I’ll talk more about him in another post, but he definitely set me up to not think twice about taking on things like this.
In the end, of course I had a working PC. One that was mine to do whatever I wanted with. I took every chance I could to make an upgrade here or there, and over the course of the next few years, I probably reinstalled Windows 20 times to fix an errant piece of software or driver install. I even tried some of those early Linux distros that didn’t work for shit. This all just fed into my true love of tinkering. Honestly, when everything was working, I wasn’t really sure what to do with the computer. When I had the thing in pieces so I could perform an upgrade or fix a problem, that was when I was really in my zone. I experienced deep satisfaction working hard on a problem, using the only real tools I had — trial and error, and deductive reasoning — and coming out of the other end successful. Many of these sessions went long into the night, and I would often miss school the next day as a result.
This was a formative project in my life. There were many others to follow, but this was my first big step into the world of computers. I used this computer to play Warcraft II, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake. It was the first computer on a network of computers I eventually had. I wrote my first program in Visual Basic on it. Building this computer was the equivalent of pushing over the first domino in a cascade of awesome things in my life that followed. Thanks dad, for being grumpy about me changing the settings on your computer!