Computing memories: Being on the cutting edge of technology

Tech moves at a very fast pace and I will readily admit that it "lapped" me a long time ago. These days I don't really have any idea what makes my electronic devices tick and I know almost nothing about mobile technology.

There was a time when computers were relatively new to the consumer world that I was that guy that everyone would go to if they were having problems. This in itself was a blessing and a curse.

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I am a child of the 80s and at that time, computers were not a part of really anyone's life. Our school had a few of those gigantic Apple computers and all we ever really used it for was to play Oregon Trail. I don't think the teachers used it for anything either. It was just a method of keeping us brats quiet with an extremely basic RPG type game. I used to love shooting the bear and then leaving 900 lbs of meat behind because we couldn't carry it.

Later on in life I grew to love computers and even though no one was making me do this I would learn DOS commands and nefariously use this knowledge to intentionally screw up the computers in the showrooms at Wal-Mart.

In college, I studied a lot of computer-oriented topics and also got a job in the university computer lab where our days were filled with helping other students with what I considered to be rather trivial problems such as not understanding where to put a floppy disk or the importance of choosing where to save whatever document you were working on so that you could actually access them later.

One of the perks of this job was the fact that when equipment would get replaced that the administrators would let us take whatever we wanted of the old stuff, for free.

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I remember when Apple tried to re-enter the hardware world with these colorful self-contained computers and I guess they sold a lot of them. For me and my computer-geek friends, we were completely disinterested because you couldn't customize them.

I would take all of my free components back home and just fiddle with them until I got them to work. Once again, this was not a part of my curriculum but simply something I enjoyed doing. One day I found out how to overclock processors just using a pencil and that was where the real fun began. Although it wouldn't do it for very long because of obvious cooling issues, I could make a processor run at 4-5 times the speed it was intended to. When the CPU eventually fried out and often took the motherboard to hell with it, it didn't matter to me because I had a relatively endless supply of parts from the computer lab that I was allowed to take. They just had a giant room of old stuff that the college didn't know what to do with but also couldn't be seen throwing them out. In retrospect I wish we had done some sort of refurb program to give to poor families rather than just sending them home with me to find new and interesting ways to blow them up.

After I graduated from college I kind of lost touch with the industry and the industry was moving so quickly that just a few months out of "the game" meant that you were hopelessly left behind in current tech. I found it really difficult to keep up while also juggling a career, moving around a bunch, and a tiny bit of a social life.

I do look back fondly on those days where I felt like a pioneer of computing though because I was one of the few people that I knew that could look at the inside of a computer case and know exactly what everything did. I don't even know if this sort of skill is even taught, I presume that it is somewhere.

There were 2 times in my life that I gained a valuable skill not because I was being made to do it via education but because I genuinely wanted to be good at it and was very interested in the topic matter. This was one of them. I feel a little bit bad about the fact that I barely even know how to access the BIOS on most computers these days. I also had a falling out with Linux because of the fact that there are so many distributions that are all slightly different from one another. I'll probably try my hand at getting back involved with that again in the future but as far as marketable skills are concerned, I fear that I am permanently left behind in this field. It just moves too quickly for me to keep up.

There was a time though and I like to think back about how I had a workbench in my bedroom with computer components strewn all over the place and me just plugging things into various other components just to see what would happen. I would imagine I still have a few of those hard drives sitting in an attic somewhere even though I don't even know how one would power those things up these days.