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What spurred your interest in computers?

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That's the thing I always lurked, old handle was Nick Caputo....hahahah j/k never had one my own account just used my brother's. Never posted. Anyhooo, something just made me decide to start posting.... I always wanted a voice, figured I'd get myself outta junior member status by sharing some of the questions I had.... that too much??
 
I bought a packard bell p200 in 97', I new nothing about computers at all and found out I got ripped off..the thing was a hunk of junk and had all kinds of problems..so I bought a book and built my own..I still have the book (build your own pentium 2 pc by pilgrim) I built a p2 300 and never looked back..I'm more addicted than ever, my sister still uses my old packard bell😀
 
My buddie got a computer and I wanted one. I bought and returned 4 computers in 2 months then I was hapy with a local computer store building me one with a athlon. That was a little over a year ago. I guess I learn quick.
 
Playing Paws on the old Apple's at school. Then in the 4th grade a neighbor donated an old 8088 (4.77 mhz baby!!), with one working program (Lite - it was a word processing program) and DOS. It just took off from there. (Received a Compaq P166 in sophmore year of junior high, then built a Celeron 366 in freshman year of college, had a P3-800, now using a Celeron 566@952)
 
QBERT!
and those olympic games on the commodore 64's...
and than in school, it was that thing, where you program a turtle to move around a screen on macs...
anyone remember the name of that?

like you tell it to go north 5 units, east 3 units blahblahblha..
 
school..they had 286 IBM PS/2's with no harddrives which booted directly from the network which was chained together with actual phone lines. The main screen was blue and said IBM with some programs listed. The things never worked right and the teacher knew about as much as I did so I kept playing with the things till they worked..I bugged my mom untill she bought me a top of the line 386DX...I've been hooked ever since.

I have never figured out what kind of network that was, but the only think i found close was a printer network on MACs, but I forget the name..any ideas?
 
For me it all started with Adventure at age 8 on the green glow of the CRT of my neighbor's 8086. My parents realized my interest and began considering purchasing a home computer. After many months of vehemently lobbying for an ADAM😱 (hey, I wanted my coleco games to work with it, and besides, the ADAM version of Buck Rogers was WAY cool) I was quite disappointed to find my parents had decided on a Commodore 64. I got a book of BASIC programs from the library and started noodling around, learning as I went, and pretty much got over it in about a week. A month or so later I met someone in school who had a Commodore. He spent the night at my house that weekend and brought his games-Summer Games, Beach Head, Spy Vs Spy, and Way of the Exploding Fist-we played head to head until the sun came back up! 😀 From that night on, I was doomed to geekdom through the rest of my grade school days, but I have no regrets! 😀

Well, maybe one-I never did beat Adventure! Of course, I play it every once in awhile now...

edit: Added age references-I was a geek for many years before I even reached high school 😎
 
Peer pressure, i got sucked in because my friends started experimenting so i thought it couldn't hurt. Before i knew it i was hooked, in over my head andhad no way out...
 


<< An athlon generates enough heat to cook a meal. >>


Thats how I cooked breafast every morning. Eggs and linked sausages. 😉
 
Littleprince I remember that thing where you tell the turtle where to go!! You could do some huge ol equations and full the entire screen with designs, and being as slow as they were some equations went on FOREVER!!! Man I learned that stuff in second grade in Canada, I wonder why they don't teach stuff like that nowadays? Stimulates the gray matter!
 
My ol 386, having to make boot disks for all the games I wanted to play, learning all the specific DOS commands..

geez, newbies today have it so much easier.. though I do kinda feel for them, they're missing out on so much considering Windows does everything for them.
 


<< and than in school, it was that thing, where you program a turtle to move around a screen on macs...
anyone remember the name of that? >>



Wasnt that Logowriter..it used the LOGO language?

&quot;pen up&quot;
 
I owe everything to my father. He's a software developer, and introduced me to the wonders of webpage-making when I was 15. I remember spending an entire summer playing around with it and surfing the net. Here's My Very First Webpage, complete with my very first animated gifs and everything. Don't worry, I've gotten a bit better since then... 😉
 
I would have to say that my interest in computers was spurred by the sorry state of the school system 🙂. But actually we got a 386 about a year after we moved to the states. My dad taught me some basic DOS and win3.1 (config.sys, autoexec.bat) and also introduced me to wolf3d. We were also among the first to get internet access, and cable modem service. 🙂
 
thats it!
LOGO!!!
yeah!
we played with that in like grades 1-3 or something!!
i went to school in toronto....

i remember you just set it up to do a bunch of stuff, and you could leave it and it'd take like the rest of the day to draw the pattern out!!
 
For me it started when my uncle, who worked for IBM at the time asked if i was interested in all the old PC stuff he had, knowing i was studying electronics. I got a car full of parts, which i put together giving me a IBM XT and AT. 6 months later i bought a 386DX40 mainboard and some memory, which was top of the line then and it went downhill with me quicker and quicker ever since. Since i have had a 486DX266, DX4100, DX4120, Pentium 75, Pentium 133, Pentium 166, P2-233, Celeron 300, P3-450, Athlon 800 and now an Athlon 1000. All machines have been overclocked starting with the DX2 and the upgrade path from 486 to P2-233 was all within 1 or 1.5 years. Once i started thinking about how much money i put into this... I never finished that, too much of a shock. 😉
 
One of my neighbors (who works for IBM) built my first rig (it's called &quot;The Beginning&quot; if you go to my rig page). As we got new software, I began to notice that I needed to upgrade the system, but I was only 8 or so (1993) and there wasn't much I could do about it. I started playing with the system a little more trying to make things run better. It brings a tear to me merry eye to remember my first delve into tweaking. We finally got it upgraded (from a 90MHz Pentium to a 150MHz Pentium), and I wanted to help, but my parenrts wouldn't let me. Later, I got 64 MBs of RAM. I was stoked, but stil hadn't gotten a chance to help. I continued to play around with it until I finally got to play with some hardware instead of just software tweaking. That was over at CompuGuru's old house. I bought my first 3D video card (the good ole TNT) from CG. And then...Christmas of 1999, I got my ABIT BM6, 128MBs of PC133, and bought my buddy's old 400 MHz Celeron. And with these components (and the other upgrades from the old system), I built my very own rig. I've been tweaking and upgrading ever since. And now, people at my school are always asking me how I got into them and how I know so much. I just kinda shrug and tell them to play around, they'll get the hang of it.
 
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