About Overclocked Mind

I started using computers in about 1993, my first experience being with AppleWorks, on an Apple II, using 5 1/4″ floppies. Loved me some Fraction Munchers, too! Not long after that, I had caught the techie bug, and earned a Technician class amateur radio license (which I haven’t got anymore; I wish I never would have let it lapse.) About this time, I was Telnetting via 9600bps modem to Medievia, which was deemed by me to be the greatest thing ever.

A few years later, a local computer guy decided to get out of the business and threw out 5 or 6 Zenith 286 PCs, all of which had some hardware problem or another. Via trial and error, I managed to get one good machine out of the lot, running a copy of Win 3.1 I bought out of a Goodwill store. Ah, the days of writing on that thing, and tweaking around on it, and DOS games that still rock, like the Quest for Glory series.

I modded the Zenith with a 3.5″ headphone jack and a pot so I could pipe bips and bleeps from the games into my bass guitar amp. That’s right, I actually wanted those *louder.*

Meanwhile, I was getting exposure to Macs at high school, and learning desktop publishing software like Aldus (that’s right, not Adobe yet) PageMaker, working on our yearbook, fliers for the school events, and that kind of thing. Just before graduating I skipped lunch at a swap meet, and bought a Mac SE/30 (with the dually drives!) I wrote with it, played old shareware on it, even found a copy of the original SimCity for it.

1999/2000 was my first experience with Linux. I got hooked on it instantaneously, and I still put it on nearly anything I can find that it will install on.

That’s also about the time that I got my first tech job, phone support for dial-up at a local ISP. From there, it was in and out of the tech sector, as availability allowed.

And there we are, that’s where I grew up in tech. It would have been fabulous to be around for more of its origins. Got a story of your own? Slap it in the comments!

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