Growing up as a Techie

Being the family tech support consultant was not great...

My mother’s IE looked like this - no foolin’

My first brush with computers was in an advanced education experimental class when I was in 3rd grade. It was a Commodore PET, and it had educational software on it. But I was entranced.

Later, in high school, we had one of the first Apple ][ labs, and I was glued to the screens every day after school. I saved up my paper route money, and then bought an Atari 800 home computer (the Apple was about 2.5X the price, and the Atari played better games - a no brainer).

Thus, I had a reputation in my family as the go to for tech, and as they got into computers, and had issues, I was the person they all went to. The number of times I had to clear out really bad malware infestations, de-toolbar Internet Explorer, and I installed so many memory upgrades for people who bought cheap PC’s that were criminally configured.

But one event really sticks out. In the late 1990’s, against all advice, my mother got a PC. She didn’t ask me what she should buy, but instead bought a Packard Bell¹. Her sister did as well. Two of the same. These were lowish spec systems, I seem to recall that they used Cyrix “486” class processors, that worked OK, but they were criminally short on RAM. I fixed up my mothers system with 16M RAM, and it really made it usable. My aunt asked nicely, as her computer seems to “stutter”. I said sure, bring it over, I could go grab some SIMM’s from Fry’s Electronics.

When I opened the computer up, it was literally caked with dust. And nicotine stains. The fan on the CPU was caked with this sludgy dust/yellowy nicotine paste (don’t ask).

This is not her computer, but it was about this bad…

I cleaned it all up (a vacuum for the big dust, and two cans of air) replaced the heatsink/fan on the CPU, added the memory, and cleaned out all the shit she had installed over and over again.

I left her with a much better performing computer, I was able to not barf at the smell and state of the inside of her computer, I count that as a win.

Not long after this, my brother became the go to, and I was relegated to being consulted on purchase decisions, not hands on tech support.

1. We called them “Packard Hell” but Packard Bell was a one of the early integrators, like Gateway, and others that were successful before Dell pretty much wiped out the smaller players.

---