Welcome to part three of my tech journey blog posts! In my first two posts, I covered the computers we had during my childhood. With this post, I’ll share the computers that I used when I went to college. Read on for more.
When I went to college, having a computer was still optional, to say nothing about having a “laptop”. In fact, for my first quarter at the University of Minnesota, I registered in Fraser Hall on a green screen dumb terminal: web registration was still a couple years in the future. Dorms didn’t have Ethernet then, not even the old 10BSASE5 thicknet. It’s hard to even comprehend the lack of constant broadband connectivity that existed then.
As a result, for my first year of college, I didn’t have my own computer. I had a roommate in the dorm who had a Macintosh I would occasionally use, and of course there were the computer labs. I survived, mainly due to the fact I was taking a bunch of general classes or random electives like Photography (with B&W film, no digital stuff) and Theater. Writing long papers was not yet required, but I knew it would be in my future.
My first purchase
For my second year of college, I decided I needed a computer of my own. I was going to be living in a single dorm, so no roommate to share, and my studying style was “extreme procrastination”, meaning I would wait until the night before a paper was due in order to do it. I didn’t want to spend that time in some computer lab, I needed to be able to do that on my own time and in private!
Although flush with money from my Pell Grant, I didn’t feel rich enough to be able to just buy a brand-new fancy computer. Instead, I went to Computer Renaissance to get a used computer (and based on that link, they have not changed a bit in 25 years).
I spent $883.93 to get…actually, I don’t quite remember. Maybe it was a Compaq? I’m pretty sure it was a first-generation Pentium at a blistering 75 MHz, so even faster than my previous 486DX2. Of course, it had the obligatory modem to connect to the U’s dial-up pool, back when SLIP and PPP were not just obsolete protocols on some networking test. Beyond that, though, it was pretty nondescript.
With that computer, I was in control. I set it to connect to my email account once an hour via dialup to get my email, that screech occasionally waking me up when I drifted off. I would write my papers, cranking out 5 pages per hour on any topic under the sun (with citations!), and print them out on an old-school Epson Stylus 300 inkjet printer. Funny how I can distinctly remember that printer model but not the computer.
Also during that time, I used ICQ (just shut down three days ago), played SimCity 2000, and browsed the ever-increasing World Wide Web. To join in that fun, I set up the most 90s website ever using Angelfire, complete with awesome GIFs and auto-playing MIDI files. And thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine, you can still see it here. What website doesn’t need a picture of Bill the Cat on it?
Disaster
So it went well for a while, hauling that computer around between apartments after I moved out of the dorm. Unfortunately, I missed the Ethernet-ization of my dorm by one year, so I had to use dialup throughout college. Noting remarkable tech-wise happened for a while, but eventually disaster struck, in the form of one of the most destructive viruses ever unleashed in the time before ransomware: the Chernobyl virus.
Somehow, along the way, I had gotten this virus. Virus checkers were still pretty new, and none were free, and so of course I didn’t have one. This being long before my security career, I barely knew what viruses were or how to detect and remove them. And so, on April 26th, 1999, my computer became a boat anchor, and I lost all of what I had been working on that semester.
And so, I went back to Computer Renaissance for another used computer, plunking down $400 or so. This one I remember even less about, aside from the fact that I used it to relentlessly pirate music using Napster when that was a thing.
At some point I upgraded it with another hard drive and a CD writer, but that was about it. It worked well enough to see me through to graduation, and then to my first job after college. Eventually, I decided that it was time to get a newer computer, and that will be my next post.