To Our Readers
I'M writing this piece on a computer I built myself. As a child of the vacuum-tube age, that statement impresses me, but it shouldn't. It wasn't hard. Editor as digital
do-it-yourselferIn the 1960s, I was a computer operator in the army. The machines I ''operated'' filled a large, air-conditioned room but were no smarter than today's cheap digital wristwatch. Two civilian ''tech reps'' tended these goliaths night and day, testing, diagnosing and repairing their circuit boards.
Like today's wristwatches, those computers didn't have keyboards. We used rows of toggle switches to load and run programs. Lights blinked on the consoles and teletype machines clattered and spewed punched paper tape as we fed in data to be stored on big reels of magnetic tape.
No DVD players, color monitors or Internet browsers -- in those days, any mouse we found in the computer room still had four legs and a tail. The bewildering complexity inside those hard-wired behemoths was totally intimidating. So, I'm not predisposed to computer building.
My friend David, an electrical engineer, fought a balky PC for months before he dared to take it apart and put together a new one from the salvaged pieces. The result inspired him to build a second unit from mail-ordered parts.
David understands hardware; I got involved debugging his software. After 30 years of coping with bit switches, IP addresses and MS-DOS, enough expertise has rubbed off that I can still keep up with my 10-year-old nephew when he speaks geek.
I discovered that PCs come in standard, mostly compatible modules that simply plug into each other: case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, video and sound cards, RAM chips, CD, floppy and hard drives.
Add some cables and a half dozen screws and you have a computer.
I didn't save much money building my own PC but writing this is a little more satisfying having done it. The fish you catch yourself tastes best.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.