I’ve mentioned during my game posts that my brother heavily impacted my choice of games growing up. But I bet he doesn’t know that he’s actually the reason I’m really into computer tech.
I don’t remember how old I was exactly, but I was probably in the neighborhood of 11-13. My older brother was living with us. He was excited because a new Processor for his computer had arrived. I don’t know the specs of his first computer, but I’m sure it was a single core something.
He had just purchased a fancy dual core CPU. Seems funny to think about being excited to get a dual core, but that was the times we lived in children. He unplugged his PC, and placed it on the table. He let me take the side panel off and look at the components in his computer. I was exposed to computers at a fairly young age thanks to my dad being a teacher, but this was different since it wasn’t in such an educational manner.
I watched him take off the heatsink and cooler he had on his computer, and for the first time I was looking at a bare CPU in the motherboard. I watched him carefully take off the latch and pull out the CPU. I was mesmerized. He carefully placed the new one in and reattached all the components. He also took time to clean out his computer of dust. He plugged in back in and fired it up.
We messed with some BIOS and before long he was back at his desktop. He opened the task manager and saw two different CPU graphs. He was perplexed for a moment until he realized it was showing each core. He had such a look of glee in his eyes as he laughed. In that half hour span, I knew that this computer stuff was even cooler than I had already known. I had built some computers out of spare parts, but for the first time I was seeing a real upgrade happen. Not just tossing together what I could find.
I was genuinely fascinated. To this day I love computers, upgrading them, squeezing out performance, and helping people with theirs. I have a whole shelf of parts, and several computers laying around waiting for parts to upgrade them to their limits (cheaply) so I can sell them or lend them to someone who needs one for a little while.
I don’t think I’ll ever not be impressed by what PCs are bringing every year. Thanks Brother.
EK Creates 