So i don't remember exactly at what point i got into computers or why so let's go back.

i got access to my grandpa computer back in the mid 90s, it was just a plain generic white box, with a panasonic matrix printer and some cheapo 14 inch crt monitor. A4 mouse and some basic keyboard, it had like 8mb of ram, 200mb hdd, and probably a 486dx or something like that, no audio, no cd, nothing fancy.

(it looked something like that, but the power switch was white because who the fuck would use a black switch there wtf)

it was fucking awesome!, i was like 5 years old at the time so most of my use was limited to paint, the windows 3.1 mouse tutorial and games that my uncle installed and explained how to make them run.

I grew up with that computer, at first it was pretty limited in what i could do, my grandpa used it for quatro pro for windows and umm... i think that was it, oh no wait, he also played tons of hearts on it, that was it.

he never had the need to upgrade it or add new cards or anything like that, except for one hp color printer he got in the late 90s that i never saw being used for anything at all, but i liked the warm up sounds, still hear them in my head.

(this is the most pixelated image i could find)

aaaanyways... when i was like 12 in 2002, a friend gave me a handheld scanner, with the isa card and the floppy disk

i installed it without asking anyone, opened the computer, plugged it in and got it to work! great! but i told no one i did that so i hid the software and removed the scanner when done, nobody noticed, but i wanted to use it all the time! what can i do?

i asked, and i was told, sure do it, but be careful, so i did and i was able to play with it at any time of the day.

parallel to this back in my city when i was not visiting my grandparents i was browsing the internet in internet cafes, at least here they did a pretty important job of actually giving people like me, someone without a computer the chance to pay less than a buck for an hour of almost unrestricted computer/internet usage.

i discovered stuff like IRC that was pretty big, email (my first email was on a local provider 123mail.cl) and the internet from that era, the similar to ebay/craiglist sites that we got to purchase stupid crap online, games, flash animations like alejo y valentina and tons others from the english side of the world, so i didn't understand too much but i played tons of garbage on newgrounds.

The internet was fucking weird back then, most of it was in english, i think altavista at some point added the option to search in spanish and so did other sites, but most of the stuff that was interesting to me, like finding info about video games and computers was just english.

IRC and early web chats were pretty interesting though, first time i actually used the internet to interact with other people in real time, i was 12 years old at the time, unrestricted access and stuff, i saw some pretty fucked up stuff that probably was just as illegal back then as it was now.

but also i had my first moments of self discovery... porn played a part, i think i got a pretty early access to furry porn, that made something wake up in me, then gay furry porn, yeah i was gay even before i understand what gay means huh.

latinchat was one of the early spanish talking chats i remember visiting, the gay/lesbian tag was curious to me, so yeah, i spent some time there.

so yeah, at that era i discovered tons of things about myself that i liked, pretty good to let me do whatever i want on the internet huh

over the years stuff changed very little for a while, internet was still the weird clusterfuck of weird search engines that actually searched what you wanted and tons of websites made by nerds for nerds, forums grew up to be a pretty big way to comunicate with local and international communities, i think the frist time i used a forum was back in 2004, a computer forum dedicated to overclocking computer (remember when getting 100mhz extra from a cpu and installing neon tubes inside acrilic cases was actually a thing?

Over here MSN was the dominant chat platform to talk with people you actually knew in person, classmates and friends and in my case, furries and people that i used to share piracy and abandonware

anyways, that was the internet era at that moment, just a clusterfuck of stuff that for some reason worked over a box that made funny noises after dialing a number, of course, we were poor, fast internet was a dream for me, but i had to do with the 56k modem and the weird hours that was cheaper to get online, like iirc it was from 20:00 to 5:00 and weekends all day.

My first actually own computer

so i didn't had a computer for myself, it was the home PC, that everyone used, my parents are teachers so they used the internet for this: downloading music for classes and stuff, teaching material and my mom used to play games like zoo tycoon, neverwinter nights and stuff like that, so if the computer was in use i was fucked.

i wanted one.

so i asked around for an old computer, nerd friends, computer repair shops and at some point someone gave me one, a pretty old by the era standards, almost bare, pentium 133mhz thing, with a generic mobo, psu, floppy and some cables and the case had no covers, so it was just that.

but i was so fucking happy, it's mine, nobody can tell me what to do with it! i had a shitty fucked up 14 inch crt i got from somewhere, mouse and keyboard where pretty easy to find.

but it was just that... a case with a floppy drive and the mobo and some ram...

no OS, no hard disk, no nothing... fuck...

and that's how i ran for a while, nothing, i just powered it on randomly sometimes to see that epa logo glow up on the corner of the bios, i though it looked cool lol

Epa pollution preventer? What the fuck does that mean?

anyways...

finding a hard disk proved to be pretty hard for a while, someone gave me one and it was dead, so for a while that computer sat there, i played a ton with the floppy disks and shit though.

at some point someone gave me piles of random computer garbage.. a 486 and a box full of isa cards, disks and other stuff, there it was, a 500mb hdd, and even better, there was a isa modem, and a pretty good one at that...

So i got into installing windows 95 and connecting the computer to the internet the same night... finally, my own shit computer, but it was all mine.

(it wasn't this one but i don't have photos from back then).

then it went downhill from that, i developed a very early interest in old computers, or how we called them back then "not so old but kinda useless" computers, 486 and older, that kinda stuff, i got some 386s, parts and stuff, it was shit back then so almost always for free or very cheap.

Anyways... time passed and so did my grandpa, and what did i get? that old computer, nobody wanted it so i took it, and took all the floppy disks, software and other stuff he had arround, even that old crusty panasonic printer.

so yeah, i think i got rid of the monitor and printer and just kept the computer, i took it back home and well just messed with it for a while, i had tons of parts and stuff from the other stuff i had collected so i started to build an interesting collection of parts, it was so fun.

something i really wanted to get was a cd rom drive, time for multimedia... a bit late in the game in the mid 2000s but fuck it, i want a cd to play games and shit

so one day i went to a small hair saloon to get my hair done, simple boring cut, nothing special, and then i noticed a small computer shop, it was late so i noticed they were closing... i went in.

Hi! do you have cd drives for sale? maybe something used and cheap?

and the guy looked at me, he was packing stuff in boxes, i saw him like crying and he was like.. heh you know... we are closing for good so i can't really sell you anything now

and i was like oh fuck sorry and stuff.

so i wished him luck and walked away... and then he was like wait... here take this one, idk if it works but who knows...

i thanked him profusely and went away... i actually ran home, plugged the drive and it fucking worked!

thanks random sad guy from the computer store, hope your life is great now :3

I'll continue this in the future, i guess it's long enough for now.