We are now at part four of my tech journey series. The first three posts have brought me through college, and into my first job working at the Minnesota House of Representatives. With my first “adult” job, and not-so-flush with a government salary, I decided to buy a new computer, and settled on a Compaq Presario 5000. Before reading on for more, an aside: since my last post, my current desktop decided to die so I just built a new one! It’s almost as if my computer decided to extend this series, but that post is far in the future for now.
The Compaq Presario I purchased was custom-ordered, and the color I selected was a lovely green. I even have a picture of it, making this the first picture I have of a computer in this series:
It came with a standard bulky CRT, two speakers that hooked onto the sides of said CRT, and a fancy subwoofer as you can see above. The front of the case doubled as a CD holder, and since it came with a CD reader AND burner, you could duplicate CDs in a snap!
The one I ordered had an AMD processor; I’m not sure if it was cheaper or what, but it was the first AMD I had ever bought. It also had 512 MB of memory if I remember correctly, and of course Windows XP. It served me well for many years.
Into the broadband age
When I got the computer, I was still on dialup. Since I could no longer use the U of M’s service, I had to find my own, and found service from an apparently now-defunct company: USFamily.net. Their selling point was that unlike many dialup services at the time, they never had a busy signal. Instead, if you were using too much of the service relative to others at busy times, you’d be kicked off to free up a line. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally moved away from dialup and got broadband as in the picture above.
This was also the computer that I used when I first signed up for SETI@Home, the distributed computing project looking for aliens:
It took about 80 hours of crunching to finish one work unit back then. Sadly, that project too has been shut down, although I still work on distributed computing via BOINC.
Upgrades
Eventually I decided that it would be fun to have better graphics on my computer in case I ever wanted to play anything (such as SimCity 4). I was still very new to computer tech at the time, and the state of the art has moved beyond ISA slots that I was familiar with. There was this funny brown slot on my motherboard, and I was curious what it was, so I started searching around. This led me to PCMech.com, and there I learned that what I had was an AGP port perfect for a video card. I also became an active member of that forum for almost a decade, but it appears that site also went dead a few years ago. All those posts are gone like tears in rain…
I did get a video card and a DVD burner at some point, and it became a workhorse of a computer: I bought VB6 and learned some rudimentary programming on it for work, and even figured out how to solder together an S-video to Composite adapter with a random capacitor to send the output to a TV. This computer is the last one to my knowledge to be affected by an actual virus from who knows where, but I had a backup and was able to restore no problem. I also eventually swapped the bulky CRT for my first LCD screen.
Of course, all tech becomes obsolete. After several years of hanging around PCMech, I decided that no longer would I buy a desktop from a retailer again, but instead would be building my PCs in the future. I hung onto that Compaq for a while, but my next PC was in fact my first home-build, and that will be the subject of my next post.