my life with computers or how i got my first cellphone and how everything went downhill from there - part 4

(continued from part 3)

While people was moving from cds to the mp3 players you could get for like 30 bucks it was not rare to see someone just using a cassette walkman.

(a couple of photos i found about calling centers, the place were you paid a small amount per minute to make calls locally or international, some of them also sold like phone related stuff like calling cards, fax services and some even acted as copy centers)

it was not weird to see "call centers" as in the places where you go to make phone calls (and wow that's a of the times huh, imagine that concept now) the walls covered of celulink, devices that were just a cellphone and some logic to make it work as a phone line, for cheaper calls, when calling to entel or bellsouth cells was you know, more expensive from a landline than from another cell, so hacks were had.

(photo of the celulink device i have, it was programmed to work with bellsouth, but you can use it with any nokia of the same series, the model is FC-ETC made by the company Cell Access, it has a full nokia 5120 inside that was connected to the network originally).

the world around me was crumbling infrastructure being held by string and electrical tape, and it worked anyways, so in school i was studying "electronics" something i though i would find interesting but it was mostly about doing the math about capacitors, blinking leds with transistors and even some electrical shit, like sure, interesting but not the kind of interesting i was looking for.

(this is a photo from that school, like the amount of old gear everywhere, like that crusty old deskpro, this photo is from 2009, and i'm like 50% sure the dude in the image is the telecom teacher)

they also had "telecom" that was a new area of study at my school, like focused mostly in you guessed it, telecommunications, networking, internet, servers and that stuff

that was interesting.

we had a class with one of those teachers and i was determined to be friends with him, and i did.

Pablo was a very interesting teacher, he understood what he was doing even when he was still studying iirc, showing again that studying is mostly bs to get a cardboard with a signature on the wall.

anyways

he got me into linux (again) but linux as servers and stuff, he also got me some odd jobs about fixing computers and some stuff about fixing phone systems.

he also had a lot of equipment in his office we used to experiment, at some point i made a small club of nerds at his office, iirc it was friday after classes, some kids joined and i made some nice connections there, but i think we spent most of the time playing counter strike and smoking weed than anything else, not that im complaining.

pablo was an artifact of his era or his idk self imposed male chauvinism, because i remember he was so homophobic, i was in the closet, but the random not needed homophobic comments were not welcome for me, i slowly drifted away.

so i was a kid that learned how to fix phones because i had the experience understanding how those work

(photo of the first pbx i purchased years ago, a Panasonic "CTC Equipos")

like one of my hobbies was reading phone system manuals to understand points of failures to get dialtones or weird fun features that sometimes where hidden behind a 1234 password, happened a lot more than expected.

and those systems lived in offices and stuff for a long long time, the old crusty systems chugging alone, some just funny small panasonic or a massive mid 90s nortel system.

so yeah, i quickly understood how to trace, fix, repair and everything related to those systems

(a meme of someone answering a Garfield phone, saying "go to hell" and then hanging up)

yeah i enjoyed that way too much, dealing with people though, fuck that shit "my phone is not working" yeah i know bitch i'm fixing it right now

(a photo of a crt monitor displaying "chilesat Internet  and a prompt asking for username, i took this when some dial up services were still online, the last remnants of that old infrastructure still running, probably hidden lost behind a wall or something)

but, yeah then time went on, AMPS finally died in early mid 2007 and it went totally silent from being extremely weird, like for most of 2007 you had enough to get the phones to register but not call, i guess the basic signal was there, but yeah, 2008 it was completely silent, probably replaced by 3g or some other bullshit.

so

(stolen photo of someone w200 displaying a ben 10 game, i used mine for actual good games, like solitarire)

time went on and so did i, i got a sony ericsson w200 phone, it was pretty meh and that's my review of any kind of sony cellphone since then, better than the nokias from years before that's for sure, then i got another symbian, for a while i used a Nec mobilepro 780? iirc WIndows CE palmtop, the ericsson as an infrared modem and i got to use msn there (ebuddy, remember that thing?) and the furry chile irc server, what times, pretty fun, i also browsed a lot on basic pages, even in that era https was optional so that made most of the sites usable on old browsers, specially the mobile versions, like facebook, i did a lot of facebook on there.

(a photo of the mobilepro 780 before i got rid of it)

as a short bit, the irc there was pretty active in that moment, i got to meet a lot of people that i still interact to this day, pretty fun if i say so myself.

then the ipod touch first gen

that's where i'm making some time write a love letter to the first gen ipod touch

(an old photo of a random ipod touch 1st gen, probably official from apple)

loved you, cool browser, fun community, you died like my bio dad, that's ok

like holy shit, the ipod touch and i guess the original iphone, but that was for rich fucks, the ipod was amazing, when i got it iirc it was in the IOS 3 era, where you where supposed to pay for updates lol (or just download the ipsw from anywhere else)

(old screenshot of cydia, stolen from somewhere, i know it's a fucking webp file, fuck that format)

the browser on the ipod was amazing, light years of anything i have ever used, sure it had just wifi so i was tied to the very limited wifi networks around, that were mostly open so free internet, but yeah the touch screen was amazing, same with the browser

the OS ui was simple and i always though that the skeuomorphic design was kinda ugly, but it worked, jailbreak was a thing and i had time to mess with that.

so much games and pirated stuff i installed from free, even cydia had some pirated software repos, it was great.

the first gen was limited in several aspects, no camera, no speaker, it was way closer to any other ipod than the iphone and that made it cheaper.

i think the first time i ever touched the first gen iphone was in 2010 or so at my first job, i was tasked with jailbreaking it and do a sim unlock, pretty easy to do.

anyways, that was the ipod, i don't really remember what i did with it, probably it died of old age or i sold it, but i got a second gen that was mostly the same, slimmer though and iirc that one had a speaker.

during this era i got out of school, got a job because there was nothing i wanted to study so work it was, i wanted money

i got a pretty shit job as a computer janitor, fixing computers around town, sitting in an office with a shit pentium 3 with an apple crt that was my only computer, or actually the only computer in the office at all (it was two people, my boss and i)

(i listened the fame for the first time ever while working here, in the crusty old taiwanese stereo from the 80s my boss had, fucking iconic album, made me even more gay)

so yeah, pretty boring first job, paid almost nothing but hey, money is money, i got my first lcd tv with this money and with the odd extra jobs i actually got my first big taste in the apple ecosystem

the iphone 4 and the first gen ipad, with celular, my fancy era.

i got both used, but they were spotless, the iphone i got it from a forum seller (scary, sending a decent amount of money to someone and trusting them enough to send a real thing back) and the ipad from iirc a newspaper ad, it was meeting a sketchy dude in a sketchy street, paying in cash, testing the ipad, leaving, running because that street is dangerous as fuck, was back then still is to this day.

so in that era i was changing jobs, my first one was pretty boring, some days i used to stay and home and sleep all day with the phone in my hand if something happened, nice but boring, how are you supposed to learn by doing nothing.

other days that job was insane, i remember deploying small temp pic based sensors in a vineyard thing that reported to some server my boss had installed somewhere.

that's a fun fact, he had a server, i never saw the machine in person but remoted into it a lot, the server hosted his webpage, email and these "telemetry" services and custom web pages he did in asp, this was running windows 2000, in the 2010s, pretty funny how much stuff that was online, old, exposed directly with public ips, never got directly fucked with. one of my task at that work was running malware bytes once a week there lol.

anyways, i was moving jobs in the iphone 4 era, i started working in a hotel, what a clusterfuck was that place.

the phone system was a panasonic pbx with tons of extra cards that allowed phones in every room, one of my first jobs was assisting with moving the hotel software to a new one, the older one was mostly based in DOS, so machines were still running 98 and administrative machines had XP.

at some point the phone system needed to be integrated so they could charge external calls, so i wired the pbx serial port on the main floor to the -1, where my office and the "servers" were located, i just wired the serial port to an ethernet jack and did the opposite downstairs, it worked flawless all the years i was there.

(the wrt54gl, a very beloved router that was a fucking mess, probably old for the era i was installing them, they sucked, they did wireless access point with some sort of linuxy thing)

Wifi was becoming more of a ubiquitous thing, so i deployed wifi access points all over, the owner was a cheap ass motherfucker so we got the cheapests router we could buy, i flashed them with some linuxy firmware and made them access point, it worked mostly fine, until people tried to use it, it was not stable so it sucked, he never paid more to fix it so it stayed that way until i left that job years later.

that hotel was not only being shit because the owner was a cheap bastard, but also because they just didn't care.

(a review that says "only stay here if you are desperate" lol)

but that made me learn a lot, i had to provide my own computer, so i had the most weird selection of that, at some point i had a dual pentium 3 server as my work computer, then a laptop i got from a friend, then some random desktop pcs i got from random places.

the job was constantly just a kludge, there was a microwave antenna in the ceiling that linked the hotel with the other one in the beach, that thing if you breathed hard next to the antenna it disconnected, because it was fucking rusted, nobody cared until it died.

i quit that job unceremously, i was on vacation one day, visiting la serena and i got a call "everything is down we need you here" and i was like you know what, fuck it, i quit, i don't care, i'll go pick up my shit when i'm busy.

some days later i get an email from the owner himself "you have 0 compromise with the company and shit, some generic bullshit badly written in spanish" i searched and i have the reply i sent

"No puede exigir compromiso con la empresa si ni usted mismo lo tiene,
nunca se pudo hacer las compras y cosas que necesitaban, la
irresponsabilidad no fue solo por mi parte.

No me interesa ir al rocas.
Yo le entregare un informe y datos que manejo, contraseñas y cosas e
iré a entregar la oficina durante esta semana."

i burned that bridge in a way, i felt like i grabbed every piece and slowly took it apart, didn't care, i was angry and young, i didn't care back then, don't care now, but it was funny remembering it lol.

Years later, covid happened, that hotel closed down for good, got it coming, probably a covid sneeze would crumble that building.

(old meme from other era, youre holding it wrong)

The iphone 4 was a beast, beautiful design, it was "big" for the era, good signal unless you "hold it wrong" and it was very resistant, i dropped it a lot of times on concrete and never died, until it did, i think at some point a solder joint or something cracked and the phone started boot looping, i moved on to a blackberry flip phone and a windows phone dell PDA.