There are millions of blogs out there and about that many different opinions out there. If you are going to read my writing’s it is probably a good idea for you to get to know me a little better.
My father was always very interested in computers. It probably had something to do with the whole robot invasion that killed off all the cowboys. My uncle, one of my fathers older brothers, worked at IBM for quite some time even as my father was pretty young.
Luckily he purchased a computer for the family in 1981. It was some Japanese system that ran CP/M . I remember playing cannons with him when I was six years old at the dining room table. My mother hated that thing on her nice table. The floppy drives perpetually went out of alignment though and sending the unit back to Japan for repair quickly became prohibitively expensive. So in 1983, thanks to my uncle working at IBM, we got a brand new IBM PCjr.
I still miss that machine. I remember playing Alley Cat, Math Blaster, some typing tutor game, and many many games on that thing. It had cartridges that had the BASIC rom in there you could boot up to and program away. I still remember and can picture my father telling me how to use the thing.
It came with PC-DOS 2.1. He told me to take the boot disk and put it in the only drive we had, the 5.25″ floppy drive. When the A:\> came up he told me to do the following. Type dir. See the files that end in .exe, .com and .bat? If you type the name of that file in something will happen. Try it and see. The he told me that some files could be read as plain text. Use type to view those. Then he left me alone. That was my formal computer training.
My father joined the local HAL-PC user group. He and a friend started up the HAL-PCjr SIG. It was the first SIG in HAL-PC. I met so many cool people there, David and Gilbert were two very close friends of the family. I learned about the Modem and BBS’s. At that point forward I was totally hooked. 100% completely head over heals in love with these things. I still haven’t stopped downloading, loading, configuring and testing software. I have probably done that task more than any thing else that I have done in my lifetime. Including sleeping.
I have used more operating systems than I can ever rememeber. I have used every version of every Microsoft Operating System created since DOS 2.1. Installing and learning Operating Systems is another hobby that has consumed a massive amount of time in my life. Not only do I do it for fun, but I also help out quite a few friends as well.
My desire to help others understand or get through the nightmare of technology has always been one of my passions. Hopefully I can help out a person or two along the way.