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Where did YOU learn so much about computers?

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Originally posted by: MisterJackson
My Great Great Great Grandfather brought the family A+ book over with him from Germany. They tried to take it from him at Ellis island, but he stashed it ala Walken in Pulp Fiction style.

I shall pass it down to my son one day once he returns to me a SPARTAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Click to expand...

Ugh... I think you may inadvertently hit upon a comedy goldmine... too many details already!
 
DOS and Windows for dummies when i was in 4th grade,
the rest i learned on my own,
just started taking apart computers and stuff
 
Building a computer to play FarCry was what got me started. It's different for everyone. There are CS majors who don't know hardware but can program, and there are well rounded people as well who can do both hardware and software.

If you haven't built a computer by yourself from nothing but a bunch of parts purchased from Fry's and Newegg, then that's a good place to start.
 
mostly self taught.
i did go to a tech school and learned some stuff and then I did the computertraining.con* classes for MS certs.








*yes, that is intentional
 
Years of experience working with and building computers in the real world combined with college courses.
 
The knowledge that I have began from troubleshooting my first Windows OS experience...Windows NT.

Overall I think highly of the OS, but I'm still concerned it left me excessively vulnerable to aneurysms as I grow older.
 
Originally posted by: MisterJackson
My Great Great Great Grandfather brought the family A+ book over with him from Germany. They tried to take it from him at Ellis island, but he stashed it ala Walken in Pulp Fiction style.

I shall pass it down to my son one day once he returns to me a SPARTAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Click to expand...

This is SATAAAA!!!
 
I would sit and disassemble/reassemble calculators while my Dad worked on a computer, worked up the line from there.
 
I was a Geology major in college so other than the undergrad programming classes I took everything else has been OJT. I was an avionics tech in the Navy which helped me land my first part time job when I got out installing field engineering changes to the backplanes of 17 platter disk drives they used to use on mainframes so I guess that was my first "official" IT job.
 
This requires a long answer:

I was a kid in the 70's/early 80's when personal computing began to become a reality. In school, I learned a little simple programming by the 5th grade on an Apple. By the 8th grade I had bought a Commodore 64 and began programming in earnest (I also had at least one simple programming class in grade school). I studied more advanced programming in high school. I decided to become a software engineer in college, which is where I got most of my programming knowledge. During college, I worked at Sears in electronics; one of my buddies there was a hardware guru who taught me hardware basics. Later on after college, at one point I was desperate for a job, so I took one where I was complete computer support for a small factory, including hardware, software, and networking (and anything else they could come up with). It was at this job that I really learned networking and hardware. Then finally I took my current job as a full time programmer, where I got into hardcore professional programming for about 6 years (experience is the best teacher). I got promoted a year ago to a software admin position, which is a whole new world for me since at heart I'll always be a programmer.

One might say that I'm pretty well-rounded in my computer skill set.
 
I learned from getting games to work in DOS back in the 80's, 90's. I set up boot disks, then built on that.
 
I guess it would be that I was curious about it when I was young and it was about the time when computers were making there way into the home.
The first one I used was a texas instrument home computer, then the TRS-80's from tandy, commodore vic20, timex sinclair, atari st, color computer 2, 3
And I just kept learning more and more over the years.

My biggest interest with it was being able to connect to other computers.
When I was 13 I made a serial cable from scratch, a 9 to 25 pin cable, to connect to my new 1200baud modem.
I also installed memory into my atari st , sounds easy, but you have to realize back then you had to buy the chips, and solder them one by one onto the motherboard.

I used a system called rtty to connect to other computers over ham radio gear, there was no internet at the time .
BBS use put my phone bill over 300.00 in one month and my parents nearly killed me for it 🙂

I eventually got an 8086 pc and stayed with the ibm-pc world ever since.
I went to college to be an EE so I got alot of technical knowledge there on the internals.
But the majority has been studying and reading on my own over the years and its just accumulated .
 
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