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.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4425474 times)