📁 11-22

The time period created a movie known as Office Space. It was a time of great technological upheaval, and a time of great technological waste. Many were upgrading to new systems, including private and public schools. Trent Reznor was one of the newest musical talents to have music videos, Quake the computer game had only been out a few years, and Intel Pentium II & III machines were tossed away in favor of laptops and more portable desktop computers.

Actually, a lot were tossed because the internet was fresh, and lightly dusted with viruses and malware. Good hard disk drives with some years left bogged down by a lot of bad late night decisions. McAfee Stinger was a favorite of mine. Use it to scan for infected files, find the infected files, and slowly replace them with uninfected files pulled and scanned from the WWW. ClamAV is better IMO.

The dumpsters by the storage units generally had non-perishable waste receptacles. The same types rented for deck or fence removal. So climbing into them was a smart idea right? Anyway, with bro’s help and guidance we came across a few desktop towers, one confirmed working monitor, and it was time to get to work.

I ended up with a Pentium III system running Windows 95. It could run Quake, what else did I need it for at the age of 14? And it had a CD-ROM drive, so I could listen to those sweet Nine Inch Nail jams. Beige tower, Microsoft whatever ball mouse, and if I remember correctly a neat Dell keyboard (AT101?). Oh right, this is the story of my first personal pan computer.