Things I Remember
aka: Computers in the history of PJ
Around
oh, let's say
1967 while a Webelo Scout at Altus AFB in Oklahoma, I somehow acquired a Christmas
wreath made of IBM computer punch cards. At that time I had no idea
how they were made or what purpose they served, but I could tell
immediately that computers must be evil! Today with all the years of
computer wizardry and knowledge that I have acquired, I can safely say,
"I still have no idea what they did, and computers are evil!".
The wreath shown is not mine, but a copy found on the internet.In
the
early 1980's I had a good friend who worked for IBM in Phoenix and I used to play MS
Flight Sim on his IBM Personal PC with double 5 1/4 floppys.
Around
83
I bought a Comadore 64 computer. This was one bad computer let me
tell you. It had 64 kilobytes of ram and no hard drive but used a
portable cassette player to save and load data.
In
1988 I got my hands on a super fast 8088 with 256 KB of memory and a 5 MB hard drive. Wow, I was in heaven.
Shortly after that, about
1989 or 90,
my dad gave me his old 286 when he upgraded to a 386. At this point my
computer addiction began to take full force and I was on the fast track
to pure geek nirvana. I upgraded my computers as fast as I could
feasibly afford. Looking back
it amazes me the amount of money I forked over for stuff that you
couldn't give away today.
I quickly upgraded to the 386 and then
the 486, and of course the 486DX2... as I waited patiently for the
Pentiums to arrive.
Around
1991ish I paid $350.00 for a 250MB hard drive. Yes, 250 Megabites.
About
1992-1995 I paid $4500.00 for a 486DX2 which only came with a 100MB hard drive and
8MB
of memory. I paid something like $172.00 for two 16mb memory simms to
upgrade it to 32MB. I paid $2500.00 for a Pinacle Micro 1 X CD
burner. I paid about $800.00 for the first Kodak 1 MB digital
camera. I paid around $1700.00 for an HP 4M printer and another
$1700.00 for the HP (SCSI) Scanner. I bought two Viewsonic 21"
monitors at a computer show for $2100.00 EACH!!! I got a deal, they
were normally $2500 each.
I could go on and on...
In the
early 1990's
the internet for dummies was born. Yes, you could gopher, ping, telnet
and ftp before that, but no mortal human knew how to do that much
less what any of those things were. And there were numerous BBS
systems around. But what really got people hooked on the internet were
the birth of services like CompuServ and AOL as well as a few other
less popular, like Prodigy. I was one of the original members of AOL
when they were still less than 150,000 members. My screen name was
Kayaker. (I was as big into kayaking, skiing, rock and ice climbing as
I was computers)
As the internet progressed, I very quickly
learned to hate things like AOL, CompuServ and the eventual MSN. We
didn't need them. All you need is a connection, and a browser. No
need to pay extra for a 'membership'. I've spent untold hours trying
to explain to friends and customers how they're unnecessarily paying
for something they don't need, but it's difficult to get them to
understand sometimes.
I began learning about
computers and building and repairing custom systems for myself, my
family and all my friends. I still do this today but now it includes
businesses.
I had every version of MS
Windows released. From Windows 2.0 through all spices of NT and on up
through the server releases, Win95, 98x , Millenium et. all.
I
had
computers running "
System Commander" that would boot multiple versions
of Windows, DOS,
OS2 and
BeOS. I also had a couple Macs as well, but
at that time I wasn't that crazy about the Mac. I considered it to be
"just ok".
In the
mid to late 1990's
I began to slowly learn Unix commands on remote Unix servers. I
installed, compiled, maintained and ran several IRC chat servers.
This served as my introduction
to ip spoofing, flooding, DOS attacks, back ground
processes, screen, BitchX, mIRC and XChat. I also started doing webpages and
learned to manage
Apache, Sendmail, SSHd and Sftp servers and
ultimately how to configure https and SSL.
Around
1997
I had spent a couple of years administrating remote Unix servers and
decided it was time to build my own, so I built a system and installed
Linux on it. Wow... That was a pain in the butt. No user GUI, it was
all command line. I learned a lot though. During the next several
years I played with NetBSD, OpendBSD. I had read and heard a lot about
FreeBSD out of Berkeley and decided to give it a try.
By about
1999
FreeBSD had become my preferred *nix for server applications. It is
still my preferd *nix today, although I have to say, for a
desktop *nix, I really like
Ubuntu!
About
2000
I began building and maintaining business grade servers using FreeBSD
for various companies and organizations around the country. I still
maintain many of those servers today. They are used primarily as file
and backup servers, with some used as web, dns or email servers, and
some are game servers.
I
also continued to support friends, family and business in desktop
support for software and hardware issues on all platforms. This
included all versions of Windows and Windows Server/NT, Mac and the
*nix's.
In 2006 I fell in love with Mac after their introduction of
Mac OS X 10.4 based on FreeBSD and the Intel Core Duo chip. Now on any mac I bought, I could feel at home with the FreeBSD based os and be able to install Windows XP on the same machine. This was awesome and I took to it like a fish to water. It's the first time I was truely impressed with Mac.
Also in late 2006 was the introduction of a very cool little app called
Crossloop. This is used for remote assistance and I love it. In the past I have used dozens of other remote access programs, laplink, VNC, but crossloop is very small, unobtrusive and simple for the client to install and simple to connect to. Today I do a large majority of my tech support using Crossloop.