I’ll never forget the sense of wonder the first time I ever got my hands on a PC and used it to connect to another computer over a phone line.
It was 1992 and my first wife and I had just moved back to BC after a short 8 month stint in Ontario. We both planned to go back to school at the local college, so my in-laws let us turn half of their detached garage into a suite and live there while we did a year of upgrading.
Shortly after we moved in, I noticed that my father in law had a PC in the home office and I was ecstatic because we never had one at home in the 80’s. I had major FOMO after only getting to mess around on a friend’s Commodore 64 a few times in grade 8 and 9 up till that point.
The computer was a 386 PC running DOS 5 and my brother in law had a copy of iD Software’s first (and pretty much the first ever widely distributed) first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D. We played that game for days. I just thought it was really cool because it was the first time I had ever seen an actual execution of a first person shooter similar to the dungeon style game I did a hand drawn/handwritten story board and concept for in the early days of Intellivision’s Dungeons and Dragons.
So anyway, weeks went on and we pretty much just gamed. We played Wolf3D and a really basic golf game mostly.
One of the kids in my physics class told me about BBS’s and how he was getting games from other users by connecting to them over his parents’ phone line. He gave me a list of local phone numbers that worked.
I looked on the back panel of the computer we had, and sure enough there was a phone jack to a 14.4 modem. It had never been used. I asked my father in law if he had any manuals and disks that came with the computer, and he said he thought there was a box in the crawl space with all of that stuff. I went digging and ended up finding a few disks and a big fat DOS manual. To do the command line stuff I needed to do to get the modem working, I ended up reading most of it. I had to learn how to install drivers and make folders and move files instead of just gaming.
I was obsessed. After a couple of weeks of reading and staying up late learning how to interact with the machine, I finally had a dial tone.
I will never forget how thrilled I was when I dialled that first number on the piece of paper my friend had given me, heard the annoying modem handshake sound, and boom, there’s a crude menu on the screen that said Okanagan BBS, with a bunch of folder names on it.
It was like a whole new world opened up to me. Books, games, articles, and pixelated girly pics lol.
Only a matter of weeks after I got my introduction to PC connectivity, I found out that my wife had a couple affairs, including a current one with my boss (who was also my best man at our wedding) that stretched back a full year before we even got married. I moved out.
It ended up being another 4 years before life brought me to a place where I could buy my first PC. I promptly corrupted a file in Windows 95 and was down for a month while I learned what I needed to learn to reinstall the operating system. All of the techs at the local computer store were treating computing like some sort of dark art, and they were hesitant to answer my questions. I guess to them, I was a potential repair customer. I said fuck that and was up and running again and designing Quake levels and doing some other fun stuff.
Work took me in directions other than ones related to computing and it was another couple years yet before I learned how to register a domain and build my first website. And that was just prior to yet another major life implosion that left me adrift for a few years without much money and a stable place of residence.
I often wonder what I would have done with computing, web design and coding if life had been a little more stable.
I guess it’s never too late to find out. I did a few company websites for friends over the years, but never had the time to really capitalize on it as a business. I’ve intentionally avoided starting a tech support business in the intervening years because I got remarried and we had kids, and I’ve had to stick with other skills that I could capitalize on faster. I’ve got some skills and have been the resident IT guy at every company I’ve ever worked for. But I just can’t handle fixing dumb shit that people do to their systems. I just don’t get any satisfaction out of that work. My loss I guess lol.
I’m just glad I learned about the Federal Reserve system, Austrian economics, and sound money in 2003, and eventually found Bitcoin.
