PC Master Race or what I would have been

Day 20

On yesterday's post I mentioned my cousin Sandy and that made me think about a lot of things that I like in part because I hanged out a lot with him and his brother Rafelo.  There are way too many stories to tell about his family, from how we are related (not necessarily their parents are my parents' siblings), the epic new year's celebration in the barrio by my uncle, and many more, but now I want to focus particularly on how my cousins being very into computer gaming had me fall in love with computers.

At home, our very first computer was an intel 386 computer, I barely remember the specs though, but it had a 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2 floppy drives and probably a barely-there hard drive.  We probably got it in the early 90's and I remember clearly that the operating system was MS-DOS and well, I had no idea how to use it, but I did learn a lot from my brother who was the one who, I bet my ass, bribed my dad to get it.  You see, him being my dad's firstborn kind of manipulated him to a greater or lesser degree (Hi Gaby!).

My brother used to spend a lot of time on the computer, and I was very fascinated by it, and even before I was 10 years old, I was already very tech-savvy: I knew how to run commands, format disks, install Windows 3.1, troubleshoot issues, and things alike.  As years went by, my cousins got their PC, and more people in the barrio eventually got theirs and I was kind of the one who was messing around with people's computer like upgrade the RAM memory, or installing a new hard drive, and things alike.

I do have to mention though, that my brother is 7 years older than me, and my cousins 7 to 9 years older than me, hanging around with them was fairly safe, but at the same time, got exposed to things that I shouldn't have, but no complains, I guess we all grow up differently anyways.

A big difference between my brothers and my cousins related to computers, is that at some point my cousins were more into computer gaming and that's where we clicked the most, they had the advantage of a dad who was a bit nicer $$ than mine, and their computer was always a nice rig: the latest video card, the highest memory, etc.  I tried to keep up, but there's not much you can do with a student stipend.

Back then, I could easily spend hours with my cousins just being stupid on the computer, playing, talking about new tech, planning our visits to Compu Expo, discuss about the new games coming out and why PC was the best (master race) compared to consoles.  Simpler and happier times for sure and I do get nostalgic remember that.  With them I learned what was a LAN party and how communication worked between PCs, what was a switch or a modem among many other things.

That said, being a nerd was not something I was looking forward to becoming, in part because of the stigma that was attached to it.  I kind of learned that to survive in a society like mine being a computer nerd was not going to cut it, additionally, my parents didn't see the computers as something more than a fad or something to keep the kids entertained and no kind of mentorship was ever at my disposal.

A lot of people thought I was going to study systems/computer engineering, and when they started to wonder about that I vehemently denied it, and I guess that fear was part of the reason why I end up in Electronics and Communications Engineering and not Systems Engineering.  My love of computers and gaming was fairly big then, and out of everybody I knew, only one of my brothers (Armando) saw my real passion and seriously told me to consider going into Full Sail University for something related to my interests.  I dismissed the idea right away because: 1-It was outside the Dominican Republic and 2-How my cheap dad was going to cover it (and this is a topic that deserves many days).

But long story short, having my cousins around was a blast but too bad they were a generation way older than mine since I couldn't hang out to every place they went because I was a minor, and certain curfew rules applied to me that didn't to my older brothers.

Sandy and I - a night in April 2006 when I officially became an Electronics and Communications Engineer and yes, that's a beer in hand 😝