when i was in eighth grade, my prealegbra teacher, mr. tom rice, bored his period nine class one day in room A5 about the once state-of-the-art machine: the tandy trs-80 model iii. manufactured in 1982, this 8-bit 2.03 MHz beast could hold up to 16 KB of RAM (with 14 KB of ROM) and used standardized BASIC as its programming language.
he went in depth on the backstory of the mysterious model iii he had in his room as well. he learned BASIC back when he studied at the middle school and would often find himself in the media center helping the staff there with errors in the code or impressing other classmates by creating a cyan loop of the phrase "tom is cool" on the glass screen. after decades of being left abandoned in a cardboard box somewhere, the new main media specialist for the middle school unearthed it from a back closet in 2011 and returned it to mr. rice where it now proudly sits being displayed in his room.
as for the hyperfixated yet quiet student i was back then, i ate everything up that he threw down.
i discovered his secret programming contest, and for the next couple of months, i began writing a complicated calculator program with a times table using a random emulator i found on the interwebs. after entering the contest (and ultimately winning seeing as i was the only participant), this enjoyable experience which was a rarity in my middle school era would eventually land me into a world filled with technological advancements and interests.
when i started freshmen year, i got involved in the high school esports team (to which i am still happily a part of) and brute forced my parents to fetch me a copy of smash ultimate so i could begin practicing for varsity. i unfortunately didn't make varsity, but i would always stick around to watch competitions go down. things would continue getting better from here...
in late november on a cold thursday, an anonymous donator would proudly deliver two large cardboard boxes filled with old junk galore, and once the esports coach finished looking through them and collecting any computer parts necessary, it was finders-keepers from there on. as the hoarder i was, i managed to get my hands on a shit ton of things. miscellaneous computer parts, two 7020 motherboards with power bricks, a wii balance board and a bunch of manuals, a google home, some old gateway laptop which i would later give to a friend, a dance pad, a toshiba satellite 2500xcds, and lastly an empty dell optiplex 5050, the desktop pc i have included up above. it had quite little to nothing - the power brick, the motherboard, the i7, the cooling unit, and a secondary fan. no hard drive. no ram. no nothing.
for the next several months, i made it my mission to bring this bulky cinder block back to life. for the measly price of about $5-$10, i managed to receive the bare minimum and then some. i got a couple ram sticks, a really shitty yet reliable hard drive, a shorty-short power cable, and a tube of coolant paste because i was running my i7 on dry. after installing windows 10 and realizing that i don't have a network card, i still use this paperweight to this day when i want to emulate a certain flavor of windows.
what's a better time than now to discuss this little munchkin, eh?
back in january, a friend in geography class was trying to sell me his powerbook 180c for $25 and being the absolute bozo i am, i bought it off him. the back panel was broken and there was no trackball control. also the entire internal bottom of the thing was eaten away by the very corroded and radioactive battery pack. this would be the first i would delve inside the inner workings of a laptop, and you would think everything was all hunky-dory...
it instead completely backfired.
i ended up ripping not one but two very important ribbon cables, one for keyboard input and the other for the screen itself. after letting it and the corroded battery rot in my closet all summer, i ended up trading it with someone else finally and got a functioning dell latitude e6430s, which is what i used to create this website.
i purchased this xt3 in early summer when i was contemplating whether or not to join robotics (i sadly didn't). the same friend whom i traded the powerbook 180c with bought the exact same xt3 model at our local computer store.
you're probably thinking to yourself: "jealous much?"
yes. yes, very much.
it had a dead battery and no hard drive. fun. i fixed it up, got it to run with wifi and bluetooth, and now i never use it. and no, it is not up for grabs. shut up :/
i feel like i've ranted about all my computers for like half of this, but in a sense, that is who i am. that's it, i guess.
if i left out anything, please don't bother contacting me. thanks