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Computers!

Chronicles of a computer geek

Growing up with computers

In my house, we started playing with computers back in the early '80s. My parents recognized that computers were the way of the future and they wanted their boys to be proficient with them. From that first Atari 800 (an 8-bit personal computer), my brother and I were hooked on computers. Of course, those early days it was all about the games though. We learned many skills in our quest for the next game: computer maintenance, troubleshooting, and even some programming.

Our family then moved onto the PC realm. Our first PC was a Packard Bell with an Intel 80286 16MHz CPU with 1MB of system RAM, a 256K video card (VGA), and a 65MB hard drive. The concept of a hard drive was so amazing when we got this computer. The ability to store your programs and data on an internal hard drive was mind blowing. The days of swapping cartridges and diskettes was becoming a blur.

Experiencing the Internet

The Internet. It's a word that everyone has heard of, that most have used at moment in their lives, and that most of us use on a regular basis. However a low percentage of us have an understanding of how the Internet functions and the components that when combined create the Internet: the world wide web, email, FTP, etc.

My eyes were opened to the real world when I became a student at CSUSB in the fall of 1993. There I was exposed to UNIX (as you will read below), networked computers, and here's the biggie, the Internet. The ability to access resources from one server to the next, following hyperlinks, etc., was mind-blowing to me.

It was also there that I got my first experience writing web pages and harnessing the power of the Internet and the UNIX operating systems.

UNIX: A real operating system

It was that initial experience with the UNIX operating system that made me a fan. At first there was no way for me to get a UNIX operating system at home, as most all of the UNIX workstations were in the multpile $10,000s. That kind of money is not something that the average college student has laying around.

That all changed when I learned about the Linux operating system. Since then I've built many UNIX-like computers, both servers and workstations.

It was at CSUSB that I first experienced wat is called workstation class UNIX computers. The university had labs with either SGI or Sun Microsystems workstations, the same systems that the major computer animation studios used at the time. At that time I grew fond of both of these companies' computers.

Years later, as the PC grew more capable, these workstations became less common, so I've been able to buy the older model SGI and Suns for an inexpensive price. My current stable includes a Sun Ultra 5, a SGI Octane, SGI Indy, and a few other historical systems.