Saying goodbye to my first love

In 1993 when I was 10 years old my mom went out and did something unthinkable. She went to the store and spent about $2,500 on a 'Leading Edge' computer. It was a 486 and ran windows 3.1. When I was a young child I thought I wanted to be a TV repair man, it seemed like the right thing to do for some reason. This idea quickly morphed into computer repair once I got my hands on one. At that time computers were still considered a luxury. We didn't even have dial up internet yet. The neighbor came down to give us some games that were all installed from 3.5" floppy disks which took several hours. The idea of having a home computer wasn't quite absurd but it was close. They were expensive and slow and you couldn't really do much with them. They were useful for business and maybe games but that was about it. My mom understood something that I couldn't have at that time. She knew that these THINGS were more important to our future than anyone could understand. She certainly didn't understand, but this was a moment where money be damned, her kids were going to have the same opportunities as families with twice the budget. Peter an I spent hours running commands one by one to see what they did and one of our favorites was DOS Shell (dosshell) that we thought was funny because it was DOSS Hell, which admittedly was funnier at 10 years old. When I thought about the computer and how it worked I would often open the case and look at all the parts. By the time we got a new computer the old one was in pieces and I think I lost more screws than were even holding it together. The thought  of repairing them faded quickly when I  realized that putting parts in a case was actually really difficult and taking things apart was much more my speed. The first computer I ever built from scratch took about 3 hours. I thought it would take maybe 20 minutes and I wasn't 10, I was closer to 30. As time went on I stopped paying attention to CPU speeds and hard drive types and more to programming and system administration. The first class I took in college was QBASIC which was the entry programming class. It wasn't very relevant anymore but the simplicity of it was a good place to start before doing something more difficult like C  or C++. By week 6 of the class I thought it might not be for me. I was proven right when I failed the class another six weeks later. Two avenues down but no problem because I still had networking and system administration. Right around the time of that first computer, I was talking to one of my cousins who was older than me and had ventured into the field. I remember thinking that I was pretty good at computer stuff and then he decided to quiz me. To this day I don't know why he would have asked me about DNS and different things because at 10 or maybe 12 there was no way that I would have known but I had the feeling like I wanted to know. Learning server operating systems was changeling and exciting. Figuring out how it all worked in real life was something that I could really get in to. There was plenty to learn and plenty more to know. I had found it, I found a place where I belonged I found something that I was good at. Some people are made and others are born to do something. I really felt much more like this was something I was born to do. I was had the right mindset at the right time, the old timers in the 80s really had to have the right stuff. The systems back then were hard and complicated to deal with. Before that you basically had to be an electrical engineer to get in to computer science. I am neither of those things, but Server 2003 felt like the right combination of complicated and simple at the same time. This brings me to the present where computer systems are both simpler and more complicated than ever before. The number of things that just work actually confuses me. The term auto-magical is a real thing when something works and no one really seems to understand why or how. In other ways things are more complicated than ever. with more levels of extraction than previously. Physical hardware in the cloud is sold as a service in a sort of time share for your virtual server running your virtual application in a container all running on a virtual network being managed by automation and bots in what is soon to be a metaverse where you will put on real goggles to look at a fake screen in a fake office to manage your big data, AI driven blockchain app. We all seem to understand that when a blackjack dealer is leaving at the end of their shift or to go on break they clap their hands over the table and wave their arms in a manor that only says I'm done, I have nothing to hide, i'm out. Well that is what I am doing today. I'm tapping out, take me out coach I can't do it anymore. I was told once that on average people have 6 careers, not jobs but actual careers in life on average. I feel like this is a bit much and I assume that I just heard wrong but I'm giving career 2 a chance. This blog is a preview and I don't know where I will go from here but For the past 15 years my career has pulled me along and oh the places I thought I'd go. I've had my ups and downs and I'm thankful for the $2,500 investment I was given when I was 10 but it is time for me to put the desktop on the shelf. I can't say for sure that I am out but I'm clapping my hands and going on break.