Any other long-time computer geeks here who became bored with computer tech?

[Meghan54]

The fun of setting IRQ, base memory, and DMA with jumpers or DIP switches. Adding the first SoundBlaster card.

Haven't thought of that crap in years and years. Stuff is so "simple" these days...lol!

 

[Red Squirrel]

ROFL... We have a couple of bills that stubbornly refuse any kind of on-line payment or auto-pay options...and we are forced to write a check.

I agree though about "easy on the checkbook." I remember in the late 90's when a decent Pentium III system (Dell, Micron, Gateway) would set you back $3500 easy. Even building one yourself would be $2500 or more...

Oh man our first computer was a Pentium 3, 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and 10GB hard drive. If I recall it was around $3000 for the whole setup. My mom went on a payment plan and it took several years to pay for it. At that time things were moving pretty fast and that machine was obsolete before it was even paid for. I built my AMD 2000+ system maybe a year or two later since I was getting more into computers by then, coding and what not and I was tired of dealing with the slow P3 and reinstalling windows 98 every couple weeks. There was something about that OS, the more you used it, the more it got "used up" and got slow. Defrag only went so far. It would also crash a lot for no reason and that would get worse over time. It could be sitting there idle not doing anything, and just BSOD out of nowhere lol. MS had gotten a long way in terms of reliability.

My first computer to actually use was a 486 with windows 3.1 though, my sister was getting ready for college and got it for cheap as my mom's workplace was upgrading their machines and back then they were not as stingy with stuff like that and actually let employers buy old computers. I also recall using a Unisys Icon at school, don't recall which one I used first, the 486 or the Icon... But the 486 did not stay in the house that long, so the P3 was really our first "family computer".

It's crazy to think that you can get a Raspberry Pi setup for under $100 (by the time you factor power adapter etc) and it's way more powerful than the P3.

 

[MtnMan]

Not for long. Had an Atari 800, and there were owner groups trading programs. Mostly games but everything really.

I had an emulator cartridge, so cart games were ripped to files loaded from floppy and traded, and studying that code, along with an Atari Basic book, was my first experience with programming.

Yea, I was in a local Atari group. I still hear from a couple of them from time to time. Was the best man at one of their weddings.

I hated the 400 keyboard, so I had a bad keyboard from a dumb terminal that was scrap. I mapped out the Atari keyboard, rewired the keyboard from the VTY dumb terminal, and rigged up a DB-25 connector on the Atari to have a pluggable connection. Had a great keyboard with a 10-key pad on a 400.

 

[MtnMan]

ROFL... We have a couple of bills that stubbornly refuse any kind of on-line payment or auto-pay options...and we are forced to write a check.

I agree though about "easy on the checkbook." I remember in the late 90's when a decent Pentium III system (Dell, Micron, Gateway) would set you back $3500 easy. Even building one yourself would be $2500 or more...

My check writing is 3 - 4 check a year... MAX. I pay for fuel oil when delivered for a discount, and I paid the guy that replaced the roof and gutters last summer... and that's about it.

My Credit Union will print and mail a paper check for those that still haven't got with the program. It's funny, got 1 o 2 still that does paperless billing, but isn't setup for online payments. Don't they realize it will save them time and money also?

 

[Kaido]

I have always loved computer tech since I first became involved with it in 1994. Since that time, I replaced at least some of the components on a yearly basis (with some years pretty much replacing everything). I always wanted the latest/greatest parts, so this is what I did for roughly 25 years. CPUs, GPUs, RAM, motherboards, sound cards, storage.......there was always something that needed to be replaced in order to keep up with what was newly launched.

In the last year or two, I just have had zero desire to upgrade anything computer related. Even when the Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series CPUs launched and received great reviews, I didn't get tempted to buy any of them. In fact, the only thing I replaced was a SSD in my son's computer that suddenly died. I know the last 5 years or so my PC gaming time has had a huge decrease, with the last two years being pretty much nil outside of playing a little Civ5 from time to time. I still like reading about new technology, but I am beginning to wonder if I won't keep the same PC at least 5+ more years (assuming it still works fine)?

Even going into help threads in the tech sub-forums has become pretty boring as well. Just too many of the same questions asked over and over, with the answers so easy to find (if people put any effort into looking for the answer). "What's the best CPU for me", "What kind and how much RAM", "What's a good SSD", "What GPU will play the games I play", "What PC case is a good choice"?.......... B-O-R-I-N-G

Now get off my lawn!

Once we hit Quad-core CPU's & SSD's, imo computers got "good enough". My primary rig is a circa-2013 i7 jumbo tower. I upgraded to a 1080Ti a few years ago, mostly for VR, but haven't felt the need to go past that. I remember a buddy got the 40gb Intel SSD when it first came out, the X25 or whatever, and it was just such a gamechanger. Combined with a 4-core CPU & at least 8 gigs of RAM, and anything with that setup is going to pretty dang quick!

I still keep up on the latest stuff reading-wise, and thanks to working in IT for the past decade or two, I've gotten into everything from VPN's to networking to virtualization to whatever. Everything else is just depth at this point, so it' more of a matter of specialization. One of the key things I've learned from continuous education is that you have to keep things novel & have a daily iteration available to chew on in order to keep looking forward to things. I group those into 4 categories:

1. Repeating an experience
2. Learning something new
3. Doing something new
4. Honing an existing skill

Like for cooking, I have a special set of "treasured recipes" that I really love. They've been perfected over the years & I like having that experience, so when I'm in the mood, I make it! But mostly, I've founding that learning, doing, and honing - in small bites, over time - are what keep my interest in a topic afloat & slowly but surely grows my skillset. I have a HIGH amount of internal resistance to slowly chipping away on stuff, but it's been the most effective & reliable way for me to get good at stuff & keep the motivation alive.

Plus, once you have a solid foundation of knowledge & experience in something like computers, it's easy to keep up with the industry with five or ten minutes of reading during breakfast on sites like Anandtech, Bittech, and Engadget. Like OK, AMD released a 64-core CPU, or they have RGB RAM now, or you can buy turnkey watercooler systems for your GPU & whatnot these days, or Ubiquiti released the Dream Machine, plus a Pro version, or Mesh networking at home is a thing now, or Starlink now has relatively cheap satellite Internet coming out. It's all the same basic stuff, just in different flavors of iteration.

This works for learning computers, math, guitar, drawing, 3D printing, pretty much whatever you can think of. If you don't line up "what's next?" every day, then it gets pretty boring pretty fast, but also, once you've built your foundation of knowledge & experience in a topic, then "what's next?" can be slim & efficient & you can engage in continuous education over time pretty effortlessly. This approach is what I credit my ability to stay both interested in IT & also being able to keep a job in IT (working more in BEC these days tho)...I've seen a lot of guys not keep up with the times & lose out because they're not up-to-date with the state of the art, which is super unfortunate because there's so many talented people who get left in the dust by New Stuff that comes out all the time.

So it kind of depends on your goals...once you've built a monster rig & gone manic on Newegg researching everything, it does kind of get old & your brain is ready for the next challenge. Lately I've been working on fleshing out my mini Maker's Lab at home...this year I plan on adding resin printing, sublimation, and a larger vinyl cutter, and I've been doing a lot of work on my iPad & digital pencil with CAD & vector art. I used to be extremely "fireworks motivation" driven, i.e. one big project with a lot of effort - BOOM then over & then look for the next exciting thing, but the whole "small bites daily" approach has really been working out well for me, especially as it's super low-stress because I break up the decision-making & preparation from the execution of the work, so I never have to get in a crunch & go into avoidance-behavior mode because I'm trying to do everything all at once.

Getting older is weird.

 

[Muse]

@UsandThem and all: Well, my attitude was different than yours when I got into computers. I needed to do something, needed a career... finally. I realized in early 1990's that there was a future in computers. What a cliche, huh? Well, fuck that, I needed dough and I figured this: Things were getting to the point where computers were proliferating exponentially. People who 5-10 years before knew nothing of computers were suddenly needing to use them if not have them. I knew that a considerable percent of these people wouldn't put the time and effort into computers to not need help with them... that's where I could come in... if I learned enough!

I took some classes, really software, but I guess my DOS class addressed hardware some, not sure. I saw an ad in the newspaper classifieds for a used Windows 3.1 PC. I took a train there and bought it from an EE who was very nice guy, I pumped him for info for a couple hours and would call him occasionally when I had issues. He had put it together himself, custom, an early proprietary system. He himself, in 1993, had decided with his wife to do without a desktop and go it with a laptop from then on! That's an impressive decision for back then.

Myself, I didn't comprehend that my 486DX PC would become obsolete pretty quickly.

It still mystifies me how fast computers become obsolete. I've built a few midtower systems, bought several laptops. I really don't like fiddling with them, I do, I come here for help when I need to or research online, but I have never felt like I need the latest and greatest and I don't game.

The guy who sold me that used PC told me that PCs are "very powerful," and in a way that was impressive. I don't regret getting into computers. People who don't are kind of hamstrung these days. The capabilities of today's personal computers were barely imaginable 30 years ago, is my impression. Of course, most people have become comfortable with just a smart phone. Not me, though. I have them, but a PC, usually a laptop, works better for me. For one thing I love to write and creating text with a smartphone just seems so difficult. Some people are blazing fast with them but I don't see how they can compare with a quality keyboard... I decided on quality Thinkpads for laptops... great keyboards!

 

[skyking]

The thrill is gone here too. It died with the last desktop mobo that puked. I never really waded that deep into gaming, so performance became a moot pursuit.
Out of necessity I was still futzing around with ISA SCSI cards with dip switches and IRQs and all that shit that keeps a computer from booting. It was for a legacy app that I drug up as far as win2K, kicking and screaming. It was for an Xray scanner that would digitize a 14x17 chest film and send it over a land line initially, and then we started embedding wifi AP's in the nursing home networks.
Now I use a chromebook

 

[Commodus]

The thrill is gone here too. It died with the last desktop mobo that puked. I never really waded that deep into gaming, so performance became a moot pursuit.
Out of necessity I was still futzing around with ISA SCSI cards with dip switches and IRQs and all that shit that keeps a computer from booting. It was for a legacy app that I drug up as far as win2K, kicking and screaming. It was for an Xray scanner that would digitize a 14x17 chest film and send it over a land line initially, and then we started embedding wifi AP's in the nursing home networks.
Now I use a chromebook

A Chromebook really is the ultimate "I'm no longer obsessing over my computer" statement, isn't it? You may be tech-savvy, but you've made a conscious decision to step away from all the usual concerns and clear your head. It's like becoming a Zen Buddhist.

 

[skyking]

A Chromebook really is the ultimate "I'm no longer obsessing over my computer" statement, isn't it? You may be tech-savvy, but you've made a conscious decision to step away from all the usual concerns and clear your head. It's like becoming a Zen Buddhist.

It dovetails with the bare bones Android phone nicely. I do have a debian home server with a few cameras on it, but it was build with the idea of minimal power usage. A speedster it in NOT! The slim HTPC case had been laying around for 7 or 8 years.
I have a pile of junk in the garage to recycle now. I look at it and am amazed at how much stuff from this forum's FS/FT forum ended up here.

 

[PingSpike]

Oh man our first computer was a Pentium 3, 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and 10GB hard drive. If I recall it was around $3000 for the whole setup. My mom went on a payment plan and it took several years to pay for it. At that time things were moving pretty fast and that machine was obsolete before it was even paid for. I built my AMD 2000+ system maybe a year or two later since I was getting more into computers by then, coding and what not and I was tired of dealing with the slow P3 and reinstalling windows 98 every couple weeks. There was something about that OS, the more you used it, the more it got "used up" and got slow. Defrag only went so far. It would also crash a lot for no reason and that would get worse over time. It could be sitting there idle not doing anything, and just BSOD out of nowhere lol. MS had gotten a long way in terms of reliability.

Windows 9x was notorious for eating itself. I figured it needed an reinstall after 6 months. The root cause was probably DLL hell. All programs would write their installed dlls into the same location so things would end up tapping different versions than they were designed for.

One time I went to the store and my mom was angry I had left my computer on using up power. It was defragging the disk and she just shut off the main power. That was the end of that windows install.

 

[Denly]

The tech that I was excited the last few years, M1 - not a apple fan but looks amazing, AMD 4/5000 APU for PC build - if I can get my hand on one, Dual screen phones - have a LG but yet it is too big for daily driver, W10M - Continuum looked amazing but RIP WP.

In another word yet is is boring.

 

[SKORPI0]

Long time computer enthusiast/hobbyist since mid '70s. I've used tape drives, 8" floppys, then whatever came next as storage. I've always thought that 20mb was plenty enough by the late '80s.
Early home computers like Apple II+/IIc, IIe, Commodre 64/128/Amiga 500/2000, IBM PC/PCJr., Atari 400/600/800, Sharp Z80s, Timex Sinclairs, have passed through my hand, some from friends who shared the same thirst to get their hand on the latest tech. PC clones like Texas Instruments, Leading Edge, Eagle, Compaq I've been able to use in various offices.

Putting parts together have never been easier. I remember the days that you had to have a manual just putting the parts together and make it work correctly.
Figuring out the correct jumper setting for IDE as an example... master, slave, cable select. Same thing with those various motherboards, what a headache.

And now you have things like tablets and cellphones that can potentially do what '80s PC do and way much faster. It's come to a point that YES assembling parts to built a computer these days is
simply BORING/UNEXCITING. You expect something to fail and yet it just works in the first boot.

 

[MtnMan]

As I posted earlier, I entered the computer world being trained on mainframes starting in 1969. By the early 90s, networks were starting to make their mark in the industry. After 20+ years in mainframes I started to transition myself toward networks. The company was just sticking its toes into networks. One guy was fortunate enough to get selected for Novell training, and I borrowed the books he got in class and self-study and got my CNA Certification.

Went and plunked down a copy on the boss's desk (he worked in a different city), and that opened a number of option within the company. Of over 100,000 employees I was one of the first 150 that went into a new title and pay silos, a Network Installation and Support Engineer. Got a bunch of certifications, Cisco, Bay Networks, Windows Server, NetWare 4 then 5, etc., which made my skills very marketable. The company compensated to keep the network people from leaving. Eventually went into the Project Management side of network installs, until 9/11 caused a downturn in business, and the company offered early retirement. I was 55 and took it.

The Wife said "you ain't staying home" so I started teaching network, security, and CCNA courses at the local community college part-time, and did that for 15 years. I enjoyed that and the money was good.

Re certified my CCNA several times while teaching, but that too now lapsed.

 

[mindless1]

You knew it was coming...

In Soviet Russia, Computer Tech Gets Bored With YOU !

AI does bother me a little bit, conundrums like what choices a self driving car will make. And robot police.

 

[dainthomas]

You pretty much have to be into hardcore PC gaming to make constantly upgrading worthwhile. A bare bones rig will handle the other 99% of use cases easily. I play mostly 5-10 year old games on my rig, and my 2400g is more than sufficient.

 

[ultimatebob]

You pretty much have to be into hardcore PC gaming to make constantly upgrading worthwhile. A bare bones rig will handle the other 99% of use cases easily. I play mostly 5-10 year old games on my rig, and my 2400g is more than sufficient.

You can't even buy the parts to make a high-end gaming PC at retail right now, anyway. Any GPU with more than 4 GB of video memory is getting scooped up by a crypto miner for 2X MSRP.

 

[Kenny]

+1..I haven't been on these forums for 7 years and just remembered about it now. I used to be on top of building rigs annually; last one I built was 1.5 years ago, and before that, just under 7 years.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Supply chain for any high end component is messed up right now, in fact it's been like 3 years so can't even blame covid. They need to get their act together and produce more parts. When I wanted to get into mining a few years ago I found it was damn near impossible to get cards even then. I ended up getting 2 and mined for like a year but then I repurposed the hardware for a gaming rig upgrade.