Yes, there was a time when Gateway was a respected name in personal computers. I had been working at my first real job for about six months and decided I really needed a new computer. The old Compaq 386 had served me well but it’s glory days were long behind. However, I didn’t have enough cash to actually buy myself a computer. So I decided to put the whole thing on one of my brand new credit cards. For a long time afterwards I debated about whether this was a good idea or not but considering where the Gateway eventually took me I think it was ultimately a good choice.

So I ordered myself a Gateway Pentium 133MHz somewhere in the later half of 1995. The Gateway came pre-installed with Windows 95 which would be my first exposure to Microsoft’s brand-new operating system and I was very excited about this. It was light-years ahead of Windows 3.1 in every respect and I was absolutely blown away by the new user-interface and overall stability of the system. Most importantly though, the Gateway was fast enough to run games more graphically intense than Solitaire. Eager to make use of all that CPU horsepower I went to the Computer City in Jacksonville Florida and bought myself a copy of Dark Forces — a first-person shooter set in the Star Wars universe. This was a pivotal moment in my career.

Every day I would come home from work, eat dinner, and do a few chores like laundry or cleaning up my apartment. Playing Dark Forces at the end of the day would be my reward for taking care of my apartment. Over the next several of months I played all the way through Dark Forces three times. I went back to Computer City to see if they had any other games I might like. I was hooked.

This time I came home with a game titled Duke Nukem 3D. I didn’t think it could get any better than Dark Forces but Duke Nukem blew it out of the water.

In the summer of 1996 I switched jobs and started working at a new company which had more young people on staff. Every lunch hour these guys would play Quake deathmatch. I started playing with them and had a ton of fun during our lunch hour games. After a few months I was a full participant in the “Internet Quake Community” with my own site dedicated to John Romero’s then-in-development-and-highly-anticipated-but-would-turn-out-to-be-a-future-disaster Daikatana.

What happened next is a whole story in itself. The short version of the story is that through my online activities I got a job offer with a magazine publisher as the webmaster for PC Gamer magazine. In some ways this was a step down from my previous job. It paid less money and wasn’t as intellectually challenging as my existing job. However, I was getting frustrated with developing Windows business applications in PowerBuilder and really wanted more experience on UNIX systems and web development tools. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to move forward and I felt this was one of those times. Since this story is about my computers and not my move to California I’ll skip over all those details.

Since gaming was now the primary use for my computer I upgraded almost every part of my machine I could to keep up with the demands of newer games. But eventually my upgrade options ran out and I had to once again get a new computer.

To be continued.