I first got involved with computers when I was 14, in 1998 while I was in eigth grade. My dad bought an HP Pentium 233mhz, 32mb ram, 6gb hd Win95 computer for us to use for school work. (It came with a bunch of games too.) The first computer I had of my own came several months later when I brought home an old Ibm PC XT. It was pretty sweet, 4.77 mhz 8086 cpu, 640k ram, 30mb hd, cga graphics, and Dos 3.1. I remember the first afternoon I had it, I spent hours typing random stuff at the dos prompt. Nothing happened. So I got some dos books at the library and soon new what I was doing. I had it for a year, and mostly programmed text games with GWBasic. When I was in ninth grade, my dad got me an old Dell 486 from his work. I spent hours playing old dos games, programming basic and c++, and trying unsuccessfully to get Linux working. I did successfully get Win95 and OS/2 working. I also got a modem, and using Juno managed to get on the internet. In tenth and eleventh grade, I was always bringing home old pentium computers and parts from school. I worked in the computer lab with our computer teacher/network admin (who is now my boss at my work) on our Windows NT network fixing computers and setting stuff up. Companies were always donating junk to us, and I was glad to take it home. Eventually I threw it away when I went to college. In my senior year, I was working at a grocery store, and saved up the money to build my own pc. See specs below. This was also when I convinced my dad that we need to get broadband internet. So while I haven’t been working with computers for too long (about 7 years), I have had the opportunity to work on twenty five years worth of computer equipment. Starting from the early Ibm pcs to the most modern. What I think is cool is that I worked on all old stuff in the order that it came out from the XT to 486 to Pentium to Pentium 4. I feel it gives me more of a perspective of computers similar to someone that really lived back in the ’80s and worked on all the different pcs.
Current PCs:
Built in March of ‘06
The computer I do everything on.
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Asus A8N-VM Nforce 430
1 gb ram
250 gb SATA hd
GeForce 6150
DVD
TV Tuner
WinXP 64-bit
Dell 19″ 1280×1024 LCD
Built during my senior year of hs(2002) mobo and video upgraded in (2003)
Currently my family uses it for stuff.
Athlon XP 1800
Asus A7N8X Nforce 2
512 mb ram
30gb hd
Geforce FX 5200 128mb graphics
CD-rw and DVD drives
WiFi
WinXP
My Laptop. I used to do everything with this. Bought in June of 2003. Screen died in March of 2006
Dell Inspirion 600m
Pentium M 1.6ghz
384mb Ram
30 gb hd and 250gb Usb external
cr-rw/dvd combo
1400×1050 Lcd
WiFi
WinXP
My 486 Linux webserver. Visit it at http://frankdzedzy.dnsalias.net.
A fun computer to mess with linux stuff with.
Dell 486DX2 50mhz
16mb ram
2.1 gb hd
10mb nic
Slackware Linux 9.1