Nothing Is Obsolete

Blogging is a strange preoccupation that I undertook after discovering other people's blogs on the net. I've always been predisposed to sharing ideas and personal opinions. At it's worst, blogging offers an unblemished wall in which to reveal your inner jerk - at its best, a cyber soapbox from which you might positively inspire others.

A challenge as a catalyst for learning new things: 

I've been fascinated by computing since the age of six when I unwrapped a brand-new Texas Instruments microcomputer on Christmas day of 1983. At that tender age, I was already an avid reader, and pouring over the manuals of this wondrous device to discover the secrets of its inner workings won-out over sitting-down to a Scholastic paperback novel. Imagine my parents' astonishment upon seeing me execute a simple program I'd written in BASIC before I was even old enough to safely operate a lawn mower.

Needless to say, I never struggled with curriculum-based computer studies throughout elementary school. Still, there was always a looming sense of being left-behind in a world where the sheer rate of technological advancement was elusively stupefying. I knew that computers would always be present in my life, and many of my premonitions about what would be, have since manifested in reality. Obviously I wasn't the only preteen of the late eighties to envision first-person 3D platforms or MMOGs a full decade before DOOM hit the shelves (but believe me, I was ridiculed for suggesting such things), but dare I say that I might even have been one of the pioneering developers of such sophisticated programming had I not discovered my passion for playing the electric guitar in the late eighties. 

It was 1989 before I got my hands on a MODEM. At that time, a number of local Bulletin Board Systems

were available to the public where I lived. I remember those days vividly, and cannot help but chuckle when I think about how the kids of today would perceive my enthusiasm over things like dial-up telecommunications and ANSI graphics. Computers never dominated my time, however, and I recognized that far greater minds than my own were busy developing ever more complex systems and protocols. I knew it would take a full-time commitment if I ever expected to be on the leading-edge of software development, and of course, I had high school classes to worry about. It wasn't until the mid-nineties that I let-go my determination to become a star programmer, and became content with my above-average computer literacy level. 

Good enough for cataloging recipes.

The point of this article is to express to you, esteemed reader, that it's never too late to pick-up where you left-off. Even though it'd be considered a pile of legacy equipment and obsolete boat-anchor PC boxes by today's standards, my fourteen-year-old self would've pissed his pants with excitement upon seeing my thirty-seven-year-old's current set-up... in the same childhood bedroom no less! I'm in the midst of attempting to beef-up a legacy notebook computer without even a USB port. It has a floppy disk drive, a serial port, a parallel port, and a PCIA (network card) dock. I find it both pathetic and wonderful all at once.

Why am I doing all this? I don't really know exactly. It's a challenge. What I do know is that in pursuing this goal, I'm forced to learn all about networking, Linux, and IP routing. Whether it will ever pay-off or not probably depends on me, but as I overcome each new hurdle, my computing confidence grows. Last night, I managed to read the contents of the floppy disk from a drive I installed myself in an old PC that I'm using as a Linux server. Someone who works with such things on a routine basis would probably just scoff at my sense of accomplishment, but when I saw the contents of a 3.5" diskette appear on my Windows XP laptop after they'd routed through my home network, I felt like popping a cork!