I thought it might be useful to some people to see what one who builds computers for part of his living does with his life. So the blog begins...
I've always been into technology, right from the word go. I dismantled my first game boy at the age of 4, and have been piecing different circuitry together ever since. Knowing what went where was never enough though. I always wanted to know why it went where it did. I remember asking my Dad how electrons were related to the flow of electricity when I was 7, and science to me was the most important thing in the world of computing. As I hit teen years I began to slow down a little, settling with the average games console; my first proper console was the Game Cube, followed by the Xbox.
After a couple of years however, simply playing a game wasn't enough for me. I wanted to do more than play, I wanted to create. So at the age of 15 I spent almost all of my free time programming in all sorts of languages, from Java to C and even binary at one time! However, I finally realised my real forte when I was challenged to build a PC for a friend.
He already built computers for a living but he wanted to test me out, to see how I handled the hardware side of things. I researched for months, trying to work out all the bits and pieces. Eventually I felt it was time to accept the challenge. He allowed me £800 for the build, which actually couldn't get you much back then. It had a single core CPU barely clocking at 1ghz and at the time that was fast. 512 mb of RAM made this thing work, and the gb of HDD really was quite radical. When I hit the power switch and it actually worked, lines of code scrambling down the screen like a scene from Matrix, I almost did a comical 360 spin and passed out.
Ever since I've been building computers for people, and man I've had some fun. I wish to tell you about it all, so stay tuned for some computing history that you ol' timers may nod at in recognition, and you newbies may laugh incrediously at.
All the best,
Downing 007