Today we’re talking about Technology and how it has influenced my life.
Tech has been a background piece in my life since I was born. We talked a little about this in my post called, “Lighter Side” and also a bit about it in yesterday’s “Lets talk Minecraft.”
It all started with the Atari. Then, of course, it was the old school Monochrome monitor/PC when I was eight. When I was around ten or eleven I got my first Gameboy and so on.
Everything changed in 1994. There was a huge earthquake in Northridge, California, which affected a lot of people. Mall ceilings collapsed and buildings crumbled. This changed the life of a lot of people. It changed my life because we ended up getting a bunch of old computer parts that the malls trashed.
I remember the day dad brought them home. (He worked at a landfill.) We still had that old computer from 2-3 years earlier that was no longer interesting to me.
But these new parts, they were interesting. I’d never seen the inside of a computer before and everything was so new!
That year, my dad and I put together two PCs. He had the remains of a Packard Bell. It was missing parts like a power source and disc drive. I remember it because it had that distinct sticker on it with the “Intel Inside” logo. We had to go to the store to get parts. Shopping on the Internet wasn’t a thing back then. Even if it was we didn’t have a PC that could connect to the Internet.
We, of course, got the parts and brought them home and put the PC together. The idea of a hard drive was pretty new to me because we’d been running everything off disks before that.
It was so fast! We had our old monitor hooked up and it worked, but there were color monitors out there so we ended up having to get one of those as well. Not right away, mind you, but we eventually got them.
The second computer we built was for me. It was a mash-up of computer parts not having a real brand name like Dad’s. I didn’t mind though. I had my very own pc!
We ended up getting AOL (we didn’t know any better) and used it for quite a while.
Me being the gamer, I found a game called Gemstone III. It was a MUD, which is pretty much a text-based MMORPG.
Text-what?
MUDs man. Get with it.
I would play with friends and even Dad got into it.
It was all such a really fun time. I’ve been building PCs since then and really enjoy it. I had a job working at Intel as a contractor and was putting windows builds on PCs by the time I left there. It was probably the best job I had.
In the 2010s, I made a YouTube channel and vlogged my heart out for a year. Then I swapped over to twitch.tv and streamed for about 2 years there.
I’m so happy to have grown up seeing all of this come to pass.
I mean, imagine a world without the average person having a cellphone! Those were the times I grew up in.
Thanks so much for listening to my story! I appreciate it.
Katherine
Author Katherine Phillips 