About my PC interests
I grew up and was schooled in California's Silicon Valley and have been longtime interested in the advances in electronics technologies. I then resided in the U.S. Virgin Islands for several years until 1984. I began my experience with desktop computing when I had been presented with a used CP/M machine as a gift in 1985. It had been a Sanyo MBC-1000 machine sporting the Zilog Z80A CPU with 64 kiloBytes of memory and it ran the CP/M 2.2 Operating System (an early form of DOS from Digital Research). My current Casio wristwatch is now surely even more sophisticated.
I eventually took my reluctantly anticipated leap onto the IBM PC / Windows platform in the early part of 1995 when I purchased an Acer Acros desktop computer sporting the newly introduced 75 MHz Intel Pentium P54 CPU with a whopping 4 MB of RAM. It also came with MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. I had initially experienced so many issues with the included Mitsumi CDRom drive that I shipped the machine to Acer and the company generously provided me with a free upgrade to a 90 MHz Pentium machine with 8 MB of RAM and a coupon for a free Windows 95 upgrade when it was to be released in August 1995. I was eventually compelled to replace the replacement system's unreliable Mitsumi drive with an expensive yet dependable Creative Labs drive that I had purchased locally. IDE after-market CDRom drives were difficult to find in those early Pentium days as the AT-Bus after-market drives were more readily available. For the sake of performance, reliability and scalability, I've constructed every computer for my own use since then.
I've worked with blueprints, wiring diagrams, schematics, relay logic, programmable logic controllers, industrial electronics and microprocessor based systems since graduating from Polytechnical Institute of San Jose, California in 1974. I later became a licensed master electrician in 1988 and owned a small electrical contracting & servicing business. Eventually desiring a less physically strenuous working environment, I completed Microsoft Certified System Engineer training and earned the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator certification.
I had originally purchased a Pentium PC because I had been creating and editing videotapes and intended to implement the much lauded advantages of Non-Linear Editing (NLE) and desired the ability to create and add simple computer generated video effects. I quickly discovered how disappointing 320x240 analog video capture and editing on a primitive non-MMX enabled Pentium PC was. I routinely encountered dropped frames and poor scalability to the NTSC standard 720x480 DVD format. Therefore, my PC interests quickly migrated to Systems and Network Administration and relevant interests.
Now, since the advent of firewire and DV capture, the video capabilities of desktop PC's has exploded. Currently, PC consumers can now easily support 1920x1080 High Definition video capture, editing and Blu-Ray disc creation. I currently utilize a workhorse of a workstation machine consisting of a hyper-threaded Intel quad core i7 CPU sporting 4 cores and 4 virtual cores (8 total) utilizing 12 GB of RAM which can capably handle any routine task.