Hello everyone on the all mighty forum! My question for everyone is: how did you get into liking computers(if you do)? Like, did you start reading about computers and finding it super interesting?
For me, I bought a 2gb ddr2 ram stick, and installed it in my computer, and Idk why, but I found it fun (I'm weird OK), so then I kept on adding and removing things from the build.
Back to now, I'm on this forum pretty much erday because I just love reading dah computer stuff and I will be building my first full computer on cyber Monday (pretty sure December 2nd).
So back to the question, how did you get into liking computers (if you do)?
building computers at around 5 years old with my father at his shop. My father is an electrical engineer and when i use to live in Italy he used to have a shop that repaired anything electronic which mostly was arcade games and computers. I was always around arcades and cyber cafes so i played tons of games and i started with a modded version of Doom where some programmers turned it into a multiplayer arena game, same with Duke Nukem 3D. I built my first personal computer at around 6 or 7 years old with old Pentium 400 CPU's and old 10,000RPM 5GB SCSI hard drives when SCSI was a HDD manufacturing company. NVidia didn't exist and it was a company called Voodoo 3D which was running the game in video cards. Around 1994-95; It was insane time and everything progressed so quickly, The next generation die Pentium chip became a 2.0Ghz beast at the time. Intel was really ambitious and pushing hard and fast. I remember USB's being 10mb and they were only good for txt files, anything more and it couldn't handle it.
For me it was porn. As a young man I'd surf porn on my parents PC and had to hide it, so I learned how to mask my habit. Then obviously I got many viruses, so I had to learn to fix the issues I caused. Learning registry fixes and reinstalling windows got me better at understanding pc's.
Then came games, and the need for hardware to run them. I've built two of my own and 6 for friends and families. Also any time anyone has a problem I'm called on to fix them. The only issue I have is I'm not actually all that knowledgable. I just google what I have to do and follow directions well. If we had a scale 10 being a programing wizard and 1 being an average user I'd be a 4-5 at best.
Movies, they made hacking like being an anarchist and also aweosme and such and when I found out I was good at math, I left my fantasy of grandeur for drawing and started focusing on hacking and such found a group of friends in school who liked the same and we would f up the school's computer and made the IT guy a living hell for a while but he was cool with it, he knew it was us effing up the computers but he never snitched. After entering some very dark corners of the web and knowing what you can and can't do with computers and learning/trying some stuff on my own that is when I decided I love working with programming and computers.
started with console at the age of 8, then when I turned 16 I started looking towards PC games due to graphics. 3 years ago I finally got a decent gaming rig. Never looked back.
I started 31 years ago when I was 3. One of my parent's friend's had a gaming console of some kind, it was probably an Atari and it had some kind of vertical scrolling shooter with spaceships and aliens. I loved that game so much I would ask my parents to take me to their house so I could play it. Then my dad got a Tandy Color Computer that would play a lot of games and also could be programmed in BASIC. By age 6 I was already touch typing and writing BASIC programs on this color computer. Fast forward about 10 years and I was in high school taking computer classes and I made some friends that were into building PCs. I hadn't heard of doing this before so I went over to one of their houses and saw their rigs and knew this would be a great hobby for me. I've been building computers every couple of years now for the last 20 some-odd years and I see no signs of slowing down.
I used to LOVE the Gameboy when I was a kid. Played it nonstop. Then one day when I was about 10, my older brother showed me how to play gameboy games on an emulator. Then I was on computers non stop. From there my interest went into game development (Just stuff like FPS Creator and Game Maker I believe). Then when I entered high school I got more into 3D design and game modding (3DS MAX, Maya, and Halo: Custom Edition). After I finished high school and realized that I was not going to be good enough to make a career of my 3D design skills, I got more into coding, hardware, networking, ect. I've been exposed to a wide range of things, but those 4 years of pure 3D design, animation, and game mods were some of my best. I think that topic will always be my first love.
For the longest time I played on my PS2 and Wii. Then I heard about minecraft and bought it. Within 5 minutes I realized it ran like crap on my laptop. That's when I started looking at computers that could run it. I then got into the hardware side of computers and learning about it. Now I have a custom built computer for gaming. The funny thing is that I don't play Minecraft much anymore.
I would say my liking of computers comes from a very strange fascination with the boot process. I still do this today sometimes, but back when my family got one of those horizontal Packard Bell systems, I would sometimes sit there with my finger hovering over the power button before pressing it, knowing all the whirrs, beeps, and clicks that would happen after that. Then, I would press it and everything would come to life, techno gibberish like HIMEM, EMM386 flashing across the screen and eventually getting into the Windows 3.11 for Workgroups desktop with that ta-da sound. Even though I patiently watched that boot sequence hundreds of times, I don't think I was able to appreciate the tech involved back then. My kid mind just sort of assumed it was a kind of magic.
I still very much enjoy watching something boot, the computers I've built especially. I wish Microsoft and other companies didn't hide all that text heavy boot stuff behind a loading bar. Maybe it would go too fast for any sort of human recognition, but still, I wish I could see the entire process that gets you into the desktop again.
My Grandad got me into PC's. I went round his house during 2002 and said i prefered his PC to my Xbox. He hooked me up with some old parts, which he gave me, and he taught me how to build it.
I broke the new(roughly 1 month old) pc we got when I was a kid. I didn't want to get in trouble so I had to fix it. It was fun so I kept doing it every day.
