Raising the third generation of PC builders
Dedicated to my papa; a great man. 🩵
Today I taught my four kids how to build a PC. It was a good activity for a rainy day. As my son tightened the screw to fasten the power supply to the case, I thought “wow, these are third-generation PC builders.” and I started remembering how we got to this point.
For me, it started like this:
My papa tries to do all the things
At medical school, my father’s curiosity drew him into the university’s mainframe computing lab. He started a parallel degree in computer science so he could figure out what computing was about. He—like many early adopters—saw its potential and wanted to benefit from new technology.
He later realized studying for both degrees concurrently was too much work. He stuck with medicine and turned computers into a hobby. For years, his passion kept our household several steps ahead of the curve. Watching his excitement piqued my curiosity early on.
What do you want to create today?
My parents used Macs. As a toddler, I wanted to play with the computer just like my parents did. My toddler self would create messes in the physical world, like “helping” pour juice and spilling it all over the carpet.
I also quickly learned that I could “help” in my parents’ digital world, making regular improvements to their file organization. Watching the trash icon get fat and skinny over and over again amused me. My parents were not amused.
One day, my parents attempted to reign in my interest and creativity by installing KidPix, a drawing application that required a password to escape “kid mode.” It didn’t take me long before I figured out repeating certain actions would crash the application and expose the Finder, all the cool applications, and the trash. 😅
Although I’m unsure what backup plan ultimately protected their data from my 3 year-old antics, I know they didn’t dissuade me from playing with our Mac. They also showed me their own creativity with technology—thanks in large part to our LaserWriter printer.
By the time I was in second grade, I watched my mom use our Mac to create all kinds of themed birthday parties and events. She took full advantage of the laser printer’s thermal fuser to print gold foil onto dark blue card stock for the cover page. In my eyes, her themed creations looked like the real deal! She was so good at the themed creations, and I watched her turn it into a small business: “Party in a Box!”
Watching her make money using our computer and printer gave me some business ideas too. I printed flyers on her neon paper scraps offering my neighbors lawn mowing, dog walking, weeding, and house sitting.
By the time I turned eight, I had saved enough money for a right of passage: buying my own computer.
“Come to the dark side, Matt”
Young kids don’t want to appear weird to other kids their age. Most of the parents at my elementary school in the town bordering Redmond, Washington had fallen into money by working for Microsoft in the 1980s and early 1990s. Their kids loved Microsoft, especially because they got to use the free soda machines when they visited their parents office.
Microsoft’s influence in my community was evident. We had just received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation: three fancy Gateway 2000 PCs along with licenses to Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM. Our class field trip went to Seattle Art Museum to gawk at a few pages of Bill Gates’ recently acquired diaries of Leonardo da Vinci. The billboards and radio ads and campus shuttles surrounding me praised Windows 95. Their slogan, “Where do you want to go today” stared at me from dozens of spots on their campus as we drove past to my swim practice. Microsoft was living its best “evil empire” life at the time, and I lived right in its shadow.
When classmates heard that I would buy my own computer, they expected I would pick a Compaq or a Packard-Bell or a Gateway powered by Intel’s flashy new Pentium II processor.
Despite the social pressure to join the dark side, my eight-year-old self knew that I couldn’t create the same things I saw my parents do with a Windows machine. I wanted my creative freedom, just like I do today. I wanted my first computer bought with my own hard-earned money to be a Mac. The Original “Bondi Blue” iMac.
My fourth grade teacher required us to keep a journal. On a page about my personal “Circle of life” I pasted a picture of my newly purchased iMac G3… along with a picture of France, me swimming, and a Boeing 727 jet sporting Alaska Airlines colors.
Bullied by Microsofties
The kids at school—and their parents(!)—berated me for my purchase. “Macs are so gay!” some classmates repeated to me day after day—a double whammy.
Undeterred, I used my new iMac to play and build imaginary worlds at home with my siblings. Government systems for our society of plush animals. Newspapers with an advice column penned by our cat. My very first website—coded in the freshly-defined HTML 4.0 spec—featured my Cub Scout pack, our fire station outing, and my allegiance to Cupertino.
While I was enthralled with Mac OS 8.5, my older brother had jumped on the FreeBSD train. I watched him closely during the rare times he would let me into his bedroom. His fingers danced on the keyboard speaking with his command line. His world seemed so strange and different from mine.
One day, his home-built server running FreeBSD on a disused 386 gave up the ghost during a Seattle wind storm. This was a really big deal in our house. That server was our router. At the time, GTE expected residential customers would never have more than one computer. Their approved ADSL modem only allowed a single client. Without this home-built server and its network address translation, our internet connection at home was limited to a single computer.
My dad handed my brother some cash to buy components to build a new server. My brother and I jumped into his Geo Metro and drove an hour up I-405 to the only store in the region that had the components we needed in stock.
I had no idea what my brother was asking the salesperson in the weird-smelling store for. I picked up a few words: Celeron, dual processor, CD-RW drive, 12 hard drive bays, 20GB (huge!!!) hard drives, RAID1 controller, power supply, case fans, and more.
We raced home after finishing our errands. I helped my brother carry everything from the car into his bedroom lair. I watched him carefully assemble our massive new server together.
While I wished my brother had let me help him with the build, I was grateful he let me observe and ask occasional questions. Late in the night he brought our home network back to life. On my way to school the next morning, I wondered “will I ever be smart enough to build a computer like him?”
Pouring water into my apple cider
My creativity grew as I learned how to use more powerful applications on my iMac. A neighbor who worked for Adobe handed us a copy of InDesign 2.0, which I used to make better flyers for odd jobs around my neighborhood. The best paying work was in PC training and troubleshooting.
The shame my classmates had once made me feel about being a dumb, gay Mac user fueled my zealous, teenage snark about Windows, its flaws, and Microsoft’s evil. However, I didn’t need customers to feel stupid while they paid me to exorcise 36 viruses from their machine. Good business required me to practice biting my tongue.
One day, my mother volunteered me to repair a virus-laden PC at our community’s youth chorale. Pro-bono. The choir director was convinced that viruses were causing her computer to suddenly shutdown without warning several times a day. Her PC did have multiple infections including the Anna Kournikova virus and the Code Red worm, but that wasn’t her real problem. Her power supply was on the fritz. Its erratic voltage was about to nuke the system that housed her only copies of member records, accounting files, community sponsor info, email, calendar, and more. She didn’t need a re-install; she needed a new machine.
The choir couldn’t cover the unplanned expense of a replacement computer that year. After my father finished his shift at the emergency room, he saw me poking at the PC. He asked a simple question: “do you think we could build a new one for less money?”
I hadn’t thought of that. He told me to check out pricewatch.com—a website that tracked the best prices of individual PC components—and see if I could price something out. He said he’d help me build a machine if the parts would be significantly cheaper than buying one.
Pricewatch.com in the early 2000s
Photo: Archive.org Wayback Machine
The build business
Using my spec list, parents of chorale members offered to buy a component or two for the new PC. Some paid for a fan, others a hard drive. I donated my labor. A friend at Microsoft contributed a glossy, new Windows XP Pro retail kit they could get for a few dollars at the Microsoft Employee Store. I suppose the evil empire could do some good.
This first build was painful; some of that pain came from our pointed Mac-ness at home. The motherboard I had picked needed a BIOS update to be compatible with the processor. Getting that BIOS loaded required imaging a floppy disk, something that Apple had deemed obsolete and eliminated five years earlier. Ultimately I got the files loaded onto a floppy using a decade-old Quadra.
After plenty of trial-and-error and some patient help from my father to carefully mount the processor without damaging its pins, the new machine came to life. We took it down to the choir director’s office and started copying files. A few minutes after the last file transferred, the old PC played its usual intermittent shutdown trick. The director pressed the power button to bring it back to life. It didn’t turn on.
My papa and I kept on building PCs for friends and family as a side business. Eventually the cost advantage compared to retail PCs vanished and we moved on, but we had a good time together during those few years.
Teaching my kiddos
A few weeks ago, my oldest son asked me if I still knew how to build a computer and if we could build one together.
Today, my kids learned to build a PC. A third generation is getting their start. I keep thinking: where will they want to go today?
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