I have always been fascinated by computers. My mom used to tell this story of me resetting the computers at the grocery store when I was little one time. Guess you got to start somewhere right? haha Then a few years later we got an old Mac from my grandpa. It had Mac OS 8 (or System 7) on it I believe. The thing is extremely slow (133 MHz I believe) by today's standards but man was it stable. You could leave it going for days and days and it would still be good to go when you came back to it. Then we got a "new" computer. This time it was a PC with Windows 98 Plus! on it. This came with a bunch of cool themes and sounds. (I think the CPU was 333 MHz) However it liked to reset a lot and actually made this horrible noise after awhile. (When we got a new computer I actually fixed that) It had an awesome motocross game on it that my brother and I loved to play. However, being the curious person I was, I somehow managed to delete it..
My brother was PISSED. We never did get it back. We then got a new computer in 2001 or 2002. It was 2nd to top of the line at the circuit city we were at. The thing cost a VERY pretty penny as well too. This one was a lot faster than our last one (2.54 GHz CPU). It also came packed with a bunch of software and games. This is about the time I started to get more curious about computers and how they worked. We still had the old PC and the Mac and I took the PC apart and fixed the horrible noise from earlier. I also reformatted it and made it a little faster. With the Mac, I did the same. It was pretty useless though. Besides being one of the most stable computers I have ever worked with, it didn't have any use for me. There were no games or anything an 8 or 9 year old would want to work with. Also, some time later, I was given an old Toshiba Satellite Windows 95 laptop by dad. This was also very stable, besides being slow and heavy, it was one of the best computers I have had as well. After awhile, my dad suggested putting Windows 98 Plus! on it because it would make it faster. So I said alright and he helped me delete everything one by one on the hard drive (including the system and boot files...). We then rebooted it, put in the Windows 98 setup CD, tried installing, and things stopped. I can not remember why, but we could not install it. I looked all over the Internet using Ask Jeeves to figure out how to fix it. Eventually I ended up giving it to my cousin who was able to get it to install after a few hours of working with it. Now it would be cake for me to install it. This experience got me introduced to text based operating systems. I actually sort of liked it or at least got a weird feeling when I used it (I want to say close to a classic car enthusiast working/restoring a classic car). Ya that probably sounds weird but we all have our interesting hobbies. I didn't get much more into the text side at that point but I will later. A little while after that I heard of this piece of software called Damn Small Linux (Yes that is the actual name). I decided to try it and burned it to a CD. It was a whopping 50 megabytes in size (average CD holds 650-700 megabytes). It booted up and worked. I thought it was really cool and it included games like Tetris and other things. I had this going on my laptop and sometime after that decided to start up a few games of Tetris all running at once with the computer playing it and see how long it took for them to loose. I THINK one or two lost in a three day period. I didn't get farther then this though because my laptop decided to start smoking with Magic Smoke. The laptop still ran though! I decided that it was no longer safe to run the computer in this state and took at the hard drive and through the rest away. I actually still have the hard drive actually. Haha.After this it is just filled with a whole bunch of me just tinkering with a bunch of computers and accumulating a bunch of PCs and Macs and taking up a lot of space.
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| And I thought that was okay. I am surprised my mom and dad and every one else didn't strangle me or throw it all out... |
A lot of this is out of order but I can't remember when exactly it all happened. And it is getting late (almost 3 AM) and I am starting to loose focus somewhat. But if I stop now I won't be able to remember it all. So on we go...
When I started high school, me and my friends decided we were going to make a game or two before we finished high school. We had all these plans and ideas. My friend Sam and I actually would text each other game ideas as soon as we had them. They were pretty good too actually. There is still one that I think would make an amazing game. Hopefully we will be able to make it or at least have it be made. In order to make all of this a reality, we had to learn the code and all the other skills required to make a game. I ever went and found a free teaching guide off the Internet that had a schedule for every one to use. However, like the high school students we were, we all fell pray to procrastination. After a few weeks, we stopped following the schedule and stopped all together shortly after. We tried again and again but never made it far. Could we have made those games? Maybe. I think we could have at least made a very crude version of SOME of one game.
My senior year I got into HTML programming and actually modified a template of a page I got off the Internet for the school's journalism page. If you go to Malad High School's website, you will actually see an image that says "Da Scoop". I actually designed that. That is as far as the journalism page got to being put on the site though. When I modified it though, I kind of felt like I was reverse engineering it (and I guess I was in a way). I had no idea what the anything did. I basically made a change and loaded it in the browser to see what changed visually. I got it to look pretty good I think but no one will ever know.
In the spring, I actually took a class and learned HTML and CSS. Someone actually used my final webpage and changed a few things and submitted it as their own.. (You could tell it was mine due to them not changing the image resolutions for the different pictures. Theirs were stretched to fit) My teacher said it looked very professional and I agree. Everyone else's (at least the ones I looked at) were simple just the bare minimum.
I now code web pages and mess with text based operating systems for fun. Currently I want to use a software called DWJukebox. Why? Because it is a jukebox and me and my friend Spencer talked about making one and then I found that software without even looking (weird how stuff works like that). What makes this unique is I am going to try to use it on FreeDos (free version of MSDOS). It is supported and was originally coded on there. The hard part is is that there is no modern hardware support for these old operating systems. It will run on newer systems on DOS, but the sound will never work and the video could be a little weird. The reason I want to run it like this is because once I have it working, it will continue to run like that for years and years and years without having to reformat it. It will also be up in less than 30 seconds versus a few minutes in Windows. It will also give me a reason to use my old Pentium I computers I have laying around. It will also be quite a challenge because 1) I have lost a lot of the parts that it came with and 2) I haven't really messed with DOS in a long time so it will be fun (to me at least). On top of all that, I have to make some form of cabinet for it to store it in and figure out a number of things. All in all, I think this is a great summer project!
Wow is this a lot. Sad thing is is this isn't even close to all the experiences I have had with computers. I have a lot more that I am sure I could recall with some more thinking (Xbox modding is one). It is all quite interesting. Computers mean a lot to me. Could I live without them? Probably. However if civilization collapsed and I came across a computer, you could bet that I would at least look at it and see what was in it and if there was a possible way to get it working. Not because we would need it or anything, but purely for the heck of it (who know's, it could be used to communicate with other people). Anyways there ya have it. Sorry if it falls apart toward the end. It is a very long post and it is very late (3:16 AM). I didn't think it would be this long. I posted this mainly so that I could remember and so that others could understand why I like them so much.
