Intel i386After my first two years of college I wasn’t exactly sure what career track I wanted to pursue. I decided to take a computer programming class just to see how I would like it. It turns out I did like it. I loved it in fact. Not only did I find the material fairly intuitive but I was one of the people in my class that other people would come to for help. So in the winter of 1992 I convinced my mom to get me a computer for Christmas. This time it was a Compaq 386SX/25MHz.

I did much with this computer. It’s the computer on which I learned how PCs worked. I learned DOS. I wrote many DOS programs in Pascal as part of my course work. I learned how to use Word Perfect, Lotus-123 and even a little bit of dBase.

I also upgraded almost every part of this computer. I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 4MBs. I added a second hard drive for a total of 8MBs of storage. I upgraded the video card so I could see more colors. I installed a modem. I installed a CD-ROM drive and a sound card. The CPU and motherboard were probably the only original parts left in that computer by the time I was done with it.

After about a year of using DOS I added the ‘win’ command as the last line in my autoexec.bat file. Yep, I switched to Windows 3.1. I bought a lot of Windows software at the college bookstore for student prices. I learned how to program Windows applications in C. I wrote a little nutritional database for my mom. That was my first “real” Windows program written in C. I also learned database applications like Borland Paradox and Microsoft Access. I also played a ton of Solitaire and Minesweeper.

This was my main “learning” computer and I have probably done more with this machine than I have with any other machine since then. I remember in last year in college I would sit in my little rented house reading books and manuals trying to soak up everything I could. At the time I thought I was going to be a hotshot Windows programmer who coded everything in C. Little did I know that the business world revolved entirely around Rapid Application Development tools like Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, and PowerBuilder. [Shudder] PowerBuilder.

Upon graduating from college I got a job where I lived, breathed, and ate Microsoft Access for a whole year. Me and my mentor, Rick McClure, managed to crank out an Access application that did things the developers at Microsoft never intended Access to do. It can be considered either a triumph of our will and determination or just an unwieldy hack.

By this time my old 386 was about four years old and was definitely showing its age. Since I had a real job I finally had a little bit of money to buy myself a new computer with. Well, let me rephrase that. Those credit card companies had given me enough of a credit line for me to buy myself a new computer. To be continuedÉ