I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer…
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad’s work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn’t work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn’t work.
We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.
After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)
Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.
From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.