Why this
I was listening to a podcast they were reminiscing about their first computer. I was like I
should do that, so that I can show it to my future self. Plus it will be on the Internet and
nothing really gets deleted from the Internet.
Early Days
Back in my early childhood I was cruising an Acer 486 type computer with an Sound Blaster and DOS. I only used that computer to play Doom, Wolfenstein, and educational games. it did help me learn a few Spanish words. Nothing bad, just things like hat and water. I got that computer because of my mom. She didn't think it was harmful for me watching my dad play Doom vs me just playing. She was the one that taught me how to use DOS and the computer which at the time I was three years old.
I also logged into my Dad's BBS back when I was six. I didn't do much answer a few email and play games on it.
The most I did back then was play games. My bread and butter was Doom. I try to play it over doing my homework. I also had a friend that would call me up on the phone and talk about Doom and play it. We never did a network game.
Mid 90s
About this time when I was first introduced to programming. My mom bought this book/software called Interplay How To Program BASIC. I read through the book and tried to program a few games. I never finished anything. plus it was hard for me to stick with this since I didn't have friends that wad interested in computers or programming. I don't think they were interested in computer gaming.
I was still playing Doom but I branched out to some other games. I played this game called Urban Assault. Just RTS in which you can go into FPS mode with units. I had a racing game, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 95. I had a blast playing those games. At this time I didn't have a lot full games just tons of Shareware gamed.
I didn't use the Internet much at this time. I did use it for research papers once a while.
Jr. High school
In this part of time I just had a Celeron processor that was clock at a Pentium 2 processor
with Windows 98. I played more demos than full games. I still programmed not much.
This is about the time I started playing consoles more than on the computer. I had a Sega
Genesis and Nintendo 64 that we picked up in yard sales.
Nothing much about this era just played more console games, because I had to share the computer
with My mother, and my sister.
High School
This era we picked up pre-built computers from Walmart the specs is more of eh, but still able
to play games. I started to play some more computer games but it was about the same as the Jr.
High school era.
My junior/senior year is what really kicked off my programming. I took couple of programming
class. Two Java classes and one C++ class. It was great met some people that was really into
programming and I learned quite bit from them.
The thing with my High School is that you had to get through two or three different computer
classes. That just taught you how to use Microsoft Office suite, and tiny HTML making using
frontpage. It was boring since I already knew how to use the applications. At this point I
already had quite bit classes that we used word to write papers for.
College
This era was a lot fun for me for computers. I decide to take the Software route of Computers.
I started out in a community college taking the Computer Programmer / Analysis path for the
school. I got my own computer which was an Acer laptop with AMD Athlon X2 processor. This same
era is when I first discovered about Steam. Man I really disliked Steam, because I had dial-up
at this point. I just couldn't install Portal to play, because I had to download the data for
the game which was something like 4GB in size. That would took me at least weeks or Months to
download. I was upset about this. I sent an email or submitted a ticket to Steam and got a
response back in within 2 days that you didn't need to download the game to play. The data was
on the disc. Well that wasn't true. I had to wait till I could get to school and download it
there.
Now at the Community College is when I started to learn about Linux. I thought it was pretty
cool. I tried it out and set-up some file severs and stuff but stuck with Windows because
school needed it.
In this same time I got back into Doom but I started to join the multiplayer side of the game.
Since I was starting to have Internet not dial-up. This was some fun times. I joined up in a
clan which was clan:45. I met a lot of cool people. I started to mod doom made some maps and
instagib mod. I also submitted some patches to Odamex to fix some bugs and added a feature. I
added the ability to record netdemos for the port. It was first time messing with open source
projects.
Now I was going to a University for a Computer Science Degree. For this school I got an HP
laptop with an i4. I was catching up on some old computer games that I missed out. I finally
got high speed Internet with out data caps. I was getting more serious about Linux. I was
thinking of going full time, but unfortunately this University was Microsoft friendly school so I
just couldn't go full time. Towards the end of my time at the University I did switch to Linux
full time because Steam went to Linux.
Now (2017)
Now I built my first computer. It has an i5 clocked at 3.9 GHz with 16GB of RAM. I'm also full
time Linux playing games and watching YouTube videos with an 200Mbps Internet. Hosting game
servers for my friends while we co-op, and deathmatch our way though games.
End of Blog
I had a lot of changes saw the BBSes, Early Internet, and Today's. I switched eight different
operating systems. Played games, but the Doom has been the continuing game that I played all
though my life. Few things changed. I still voice chat when I playing games. It just doesn't
cost my family money now. Like it did in the past.
Things change but yet they don't
