Technology and Me

My adventure with desktop computers began 16 years ago when my dad brought home our first family computer, it was an eMachine. I was only 7 at the time, but little did I know that this silver and black tower with its bright blue ON button would change my world. Before this moment, I had access to gaming consoles like the Gameboy advanced, PS2, and PSP. This machine allowed me to access the worldwide web in ways I wasn’t able to before. After that day, I spent countless hours on the eMachine browsing the web, downloading music from LimeWire, and playing some of my favorite childhood games like Club Penguin and Roblox. After this moment, I was certain that computers would become a big part of my life.

Unfortunately, my relationship with the web and computers had to come to a halt in 2010. My parents decided to move out to the countryside, where internet access wasn’t available. I turned to the next best option, the smartphone. Back then I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I was just 10 years old experimenting with the limits of whichever phone I had. I distinctly remember jailbreaking certain IOS versions through the browser and heading to school the next day to show my friends how to do it on their own. During this time of my life, my access to the internet was limited by how much data I could use. This was during the time when big telecommunication companies were taking away unlimited data and setting a tier system. It wasn’t until my 18th birthday that my spark for computers was reignited. I finally had the opportunity to build my very first desktop gaming computer.

From eMachine to Gaming PC

The day was Monday, January 29, 2018, I anxiously awaited for school to be let out so I could hurry home. At home, I had waiting for me two boxes full of components to build my first computer. Building the computer piece by piece, like an adult lego set, was an amazing experience. Flipping the switch on the power supply and watching it come to life brought me endless joy. Doing this sparked my curiosity about how all the components worked together to do functions. I could name every part on that computer, but to keep it short, It was a very simple AMD Ryzen build that could play most games at 1080p 60fps.

Over the next few years, as I went to Butte Community College, I spent a good amount of time on my computer. Slowly but surely, I upgraded every component as more disposable income became available to me. Up to this point in my life, computers were just a hobby. I was going to Butte College for accounting, and it wasn’t until my last semester that I decided to change that. Doing bookkeeping was so boring, and I couldn’t envision myself doing something like that for the rest of my life. I want to do something that will impact society in a positive way, so I decided to change my field of study to computer science. Fast forward to today, I am a student at CSU Chico, studying computer science and ready to make a difference.