Past Computer Projects Since I have been involved with computers for so long, I had accumulated an incredible amount of obsolete hardware. For a while my kids would come over and look through it to see if there was anything they could use in their computers, but as the parts aged, they became more useless. My pile of parts was a tribute to the rapid advancement of technology. Since I used to build my own computers, I had every type of part one would need to put together something, but that something would have been considered obsolete. My part accumulation started with my Amiga computers. Most of you are far too young to recognize the brand. The Amiga computer was put out by Commodore International in 1985. It may be hard to believe but one of the monitors from that computer is still hooked up to a game machine in my house and works perfectly. Anybody who sees it can’t get over that fact. The Amiga computer was the most advanced computer of its time and it actually blew away the competition, but due to poor marketing and poor managerial skills the company with the most advanced computer went out of business. There are still a few people who prize their Amiga computers and there are some used parts available on eBay. In my computer building period which lasted up until somewhere around 2015, I was constantly updating parts to make my computers more efficient. I had switched to using the Microsoft Windows operating system, which in the early days was quite a pain since it had a lot of problems. There wasn’t much else around except for Apple and Linux. I wasn’t interested in Linux when it first came out , but today it could be used as a Windows replacement and looks similar when it is installed especially if you install Linux Mint. I had tried an Apple III, but I wasn’t impressed and the price to me seemed to be out of line. I decided to build computers because one could actually save money and get a better computer and that is how things worked out for me for quite a while. The first time I built my own computer was the first time I ever used a Windows operating system. There had been a program for the Amiga computer which allowed you to run an early version of Windows, but it crawled along so slowly it was virtually useless. That’s how things were in the old days. If you wanted to copy a disk the copy program would run all night if you were doing it over the Internet and you had to pray that nothing went wrong while you were asleep so you didn’t have to start again. One of the early copy programs was named Canada and boy was it slow. There is usually trepidation the first time you try and do a complex act so you can imagine how I felt after I purchased the parts and then had to assemble them. I was familiar with computers having taken the subject in college but in those days, you didn’t have personal computers there only mainframes. It took me a while to assemble my first computer and I hoped all parts would fit in miraculously they did. One of the last parts to go in, and one of the most expensive, was the central processing unit. When you put it in you had to get it just right so it would fit, put thermal paste on it and install a cooling fan over it. I think the hardest thing to do was to get the cooling fan just right. It wouldn’t clamp down unless it was perfectly installed which was not an easy task. I finally got things going and I had my first Windows computer. I am one of those people who are never satisfied so when new parts came out that would make my computer run faster or more reliable I tried to purchase them and the old parts would land up in my collection of parts. The collection was composed of every kind of wire connection you could think of, and many old central processing units, motherboards which are the boards everything is attached to, soundcards and all sorts of other devices such as memory cards, graphic cards and other parts. As hard drives improved, the old ones went into the parts bin. The parts bin started to fill a good part of a closet I had in the basement and even with the kids picking through It, it grew. I finally got to the point where some of the stuff was so old, they were no longer any use for the parts. This even applied to cables I had which hooked up certain ways which were no longer available on computers. When my computer was going to be replaced by another one I built, I would always give it to one of the kids. I’m talking about desktop computers; I never built any laptops. Things started to change a few years ago and the change was a big one for me. The reason I say this is it actually became either more expensive to buy parts then buying a computer already assembled or about the same. That is when I decided not to build anymore unless prices went down, which really hasn’t happened. It doesn’t make sense to spend $900 on parts when you could buy the same computer assembled for anywhere between 900-950 dollars. I went down to my closet and decided it was time to clean things up. I looked through the parts bin and realized 95% of it was now totally useless. Nobody was going to put in old graphics cards into their computer even if they fit when any of the cheapest ones today would be far better and even the ones that were built into the central processing unit were better. I scooped up all these old parts and into the garbage they went. Along with the parts went a good part of my past memories, after all I had been doing this a long time. At one point I had even thought about starting a small business selling the computers I assembled. I decided against it because so many people were computer illiterate, I figured they would be calling me up all the time thinking the computer wasn’t working right when it was. Now the pile only has a few things in it and they are aging gracefully. There are a couple of hard drives which aren’t very large, docking stations for them, some headsets with microphones and just a few other things. The great parts bin is gone for good, never to be seen again.
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