Bay 12 Games Forum

I became a technology worker early. (My childhood job was literally working part time as a bench monkey in a repair shop)

I came to be cynical about technology, before it even went mainstream. LOL.  How's that for hipsterism? LOL

I became a technology worker early. (My childhood job was literally working part time as a bench monkey in a repair shop)

I came to be cynical about technology, before it even went mainstream. LOL.  How's that for hipsterism? LOL

I'm sure I have an account on one of those old BBS systems still, you just need to give it the finger.  Besides, if Kermit doesnt work (Damn substandard terminal clients!) there's always XMODEM instead. Just dont send me any .PICTs-- So damned hard to open on non-mac classics.

I was the first one in my faculty to bring a PC to take notes.

I was the first to bring a laptop (Compaq armada 1530dm-- factory refurb, second hand) to school to take notes in my highschool. Teachers did not like having the tech in the classroom. Oh, how times have changed.  Not like it was really capable of playing games anyway-- thing was a REAL dog. It could BARELY handle MS Office 97.

Like I said, I used to work as a bench monkey part time in my teeny years, so I managed to score one from work after it was traded in by a customer, on the cheap.

AMAZING system specs of my first laptop
Compaq Armada 1530DM
---------------------
Pentium MMX 133MHz
64MB RAM
1MB Cirrus Logic display adapter (I don't think it can even be called a "graphics card")
33.6k modem
1.4GB HDD
3-1/4" Floppy
20x CD-ROM
2 - PCMCIA slots
1 - PS2 port
1 - Serial port
1 - LPT port
1 - IR port
I had a XIRCOM 10/100 card and much later, a very primitive wireless G card I used in it.

It finally died a horrible death as the chipset nuked itself one day.
The LCD could only display 256 colors.

My family had a couple computers before the one they got internet for, and I played around on those, too.  My dad did lots of IT stuff for his work, and brought home various tech.  I was too young to retain gritty details about it all, but he taught himself programming and 3d graphics in the late 80's/early 90's for presentations to the FDA.

I was never as technical as you guys, myself.  But I was playing Nethack on some Mac computer at 8 years old, and stubbornly spent many hours playing Syndicate on that computer as well, even though it would slow to a crawl of 1 frame every couple seconds after I brainwashed too many citizens.  My dad also brought me in to work with him a couple times to play Doom on their local network on holidays when he was required to be there, but the office population was sparse and no-one had intentions of working.

But when we got our first actual home PC that was legitimately ours and not some stuff Eli Lily was intending to throw away, I sort of commandeered it.  I was severely ostracized at school, and meeting people online brought me relief.  All I remember is it had a 100mhz pentium, 100 mb hard drive, and a 28.8 modem.  With that, I expanded my interest in roguelikes, traded mp3s over IRC before Napster, and would sneak on in the middle of the night to talk to people from the other side of the world.  I also settled on the name SalmonGod in that first year.  And played thousands of hours of Quake, and its countless mods, where most of the standards of 3d game design and a majority of the people who worked in game development for the next 15 years have their origins.

I'm not as into the guts of things as weird... but the internet is definitely my cultural roots, and I'm far, far more capable on a computer than the vast majority of people.  Enough to be the person everyone goes to in my workplace for computer questions/issues before calling corporate I.T., and have even showed them up a couple times.

[spoiler=continues derail, spoiler mode engaged]

I was born in 1982. My very very first computer experience was on my dad's very expensive IBM PCjr, which he bought to do his police casework on, as he was working in cooperation with the detectives in his precinct at the time on a number of cases. My siblings and I (all older than me, some significantly so) were very careful not to touch any of his police crap, but the computer DID come prepackaged with a disk for Kings Quest 1, (the PCjr version, with tandy 3-voice audio). Dad needed 2 diskette drives, so he splurged on one of the (apparently rare, I later learned) Racore Drive-II expansions, which contained a realtime chip, additional RAM, and a second floppy diskette drive.  The normal PCjr could only be expanded via the sidecars that would slap onto the side, but the Racore Drive II expansion replaced the top lid of the unit, making it double-height, and worked its magic internally by hijacking the floppy controller card, and tapping into the sidecar bus.

Our system looked exactly like this:



It was NOT a "true" PC compatible though-- it had wonky interrupts, the video hardware was some bastardized version of EGA (before EGA was really a thing), and was sufficiently "strange" that normal PC software would not run on it, or would not run "properly." 

What it DID have, was cartridge BASIC, DOS 2.1, and King's Quest. (in addition to all the police related bullshit dad had for it.)  Dad was SUPER protective of his work equipment and workspace though, so we had to SNEAK time on it, meaning we were limited to periods when he was not home, and we were, and had to be super careful about not disturbing anything in his workspace.

The experiences I had with it, led me to consider computers as "super cool" even then, a sentiment that stuck with me all through the 80s, and into the 90s. I remember constantly pestering my mom to get me a computer of my own relentlessly over that period, and being told bluntly that they were just too expensive. Finally, she broke down and got me an AST Advantadge 486sx with 4mb of RAM, running windows 3.1, sometime around 1994. She was a moron, and bought it from RadioShack so she spent waay too much for it-- But I quickly tore into the thing after FINALLY having something I could play shareware diskettes that the other nerds at school were trading. (rich kids who had access to BBS friendly systems way before my mom decided that maybe these computer things were actually going to stick around) I quickly found that the system mom got was pretty underperforming (weaksauce cirrus logic integrated video, very little cache memory, no sound card, etc.) so my older brother and I (He's about 10 years older than me, and had access to his own money) purchased some upgrades for it.  I had been inside the PCjr several times unbeknownst to my parents OR siblings, and was NOT afraid of the inside of computers (I was 12...) so I just up and installed the upgrades after school before mom came home from work. She caught me finishing up the installation of the soundblaster 16 my brother had picked up, (since I had to fiddle fart wth getting the IRQs and DMAs working without knowing quite as much about what IRQs are used by what system devices as I do now...and not having access to staples like Peter Norton's famous book, seeing as this was before mainstream internet still.) and had to trial and error getting it jumpered right.  She about died of anxiety, but when the system worked just peachy afterwards, she decided that I needed a summer job. 

She found my later employer working a booth at the local flea market (Kansas' largest!), who was equal parts shady and clever, and worked out a deal to have me do odd jobs there.   I think she wanted to put me with the shadiest computer guy imaginable to discourage my fervent tech fixation, but it didnt work. Instead, I got to learn the literal ins and outs of just about every kind of home computing device that had existed in the market place between 1980 and then. I worked there initially completely illegally (being under 16- but the shady guy did not seem to care too much for legal matters, and was a consummate software pirate, and a drug head-- the latter I studiously kept my mom from learning about.) but was sufficiently useful as a bench monkey that I continued working there for another 8 years, working weekends in the school year, and weekdays in the summer.

Shady employer man managed to ride the tech boom well enough that he managed to open an actual brick and mortar location in downtown, after which I only worked the fleamarket stall occasionally as staffing required.  He hired more help, who were likewise extremely gifted with computers, each with their own strongpoints.  I was very good at problem solving and diagnosis, while others, like the japanese american guy he hired later, were wizards at assembly programming, or electronics hardware repair.

Sadly, at the tail end of the 90s/early 2000s, when the dotcom bubble burst, everyone lost their shorts, and my employer was not spared-- staffing had to be cut, and I was one of the people who had to be let go. It was very hard to find employment as a bench monkey (I had never gotten to "spread my wings" so to speak, and technology had avanced pretty steadily up to the early 2000s, and with the financial downturn, NOBODY wanted to train a green newhire-- they wanted people with already marketable skills in specific disciplines, like SAN, or Unix admin-- and wanted more years of experience than I had even been alive.) As such, I went through a rather lengthly unemployment spell after that, but kept my tech skills up to date out of personal hobbyist interest. During that time, I ended up becoming the in-home-care for my grandmother (dad's mom) after she had complications from one of those bladder mesh devices they did the mass-recall for, as it caused her to go into renal failure, and required her to get an ostomy which needed constant, daily care. I was unemployed, and I was cheaper than hiring an actual home-care CNA, so that's how it went down. 4 years later, she passed away after complications from one of her weekly dialysis treatments, and I landed a job doing student assisting for the local college, doing CAD/CAM drafting classes. Another 3 years later, I scored a job doing industrial drafting, and the rest is history after that.

I have since then gained industry experience doing SAN administration, Network installation and administration, Linux administration, and do free benchmonkey work in my local community as a hobby. I enjoy doing strange and unusual things to consumer grade electronics devices to make them live up to their real potential (My latest victim is a WD MyCloud NAS box that is capable of SOOOO much more than the limited firmware inside it is configured for... I am hacking away on it to liberate it from that sad, sad condition)

While my employer in that early, and wonderful period of computing history was shady as hell, I got to work on so many different and wonderful computer architectures that I have difficulty recounting them all.  Basically, if people owned it, and it needed fixing, odds were it would make its way through a shop like ours, so I got to see and work with everything from IBM 5150 XTs, to literal big iron servers (an actual AS400 came in once!).  I can't really think of a better place to have been in that time, and still get a warm glow thinking about working there, despite the grueling hours, and absurd workshifts the shady owner instituted during the summer months.

One summer, the jacknut won a bidded contract to build 200 workstations, and we (5 people) did it in a week, alongside the normal workload doing customer repairs, and doing onsite service calls.

Truth be told, a fairly large part of me longs for those days again.