I have used computers as early as DOS. I can clearly remember DOS 6.22 but vaguely my "copy con" scripts which I have done as early as 8 years old, thanks to our family's PC and Programming Business. I have shared a fair amount of time encoding in WordStar and Lotus 123 during my elementary years and handled some Windows 3.11. But my OS popper was Win 95. It was a very challenging OS to install just to keep up with device drivers; communication by serial cable, modems, or coax ethernet; the unreliability of floppy discs with magnets and compact discs with scratches and molds; and the handling of the now awesome 1MB Bigfoot Hard Drive. Then Win 98 SE came and life was a byte easier.

Eventually my needs became Basic, or QBasic, which was like scripting with wormholes. It went linear for a while until I fell in love with Turbo Pascal and Lode Runner. References where very rare, even books were hard to find in our area. I remember Yahoo was still young, unlike IRC, and images took minutes to preview. When I reached high school, I have already wandered through DBase, Foxplus, Clipper, Turbo C, C++, and Civilization I. As my coding skills evolved, so did my tinkering. I smoked my first motherboard by accidentally shorting the PCI slot with a fell-off pin from a video card I removed. Felt like getting in prison but exciting. Up to present, that was my only hardware crash if I don't count the fireworks of my over loaded Advanced Electronics project. Well, maybe some crashed hard drives from CPUs I accidentally kicked due to cramped leg rooms, and some caused by statically-charged hands, my only digital power.

Since then, I have coded systems using Visual Studio up to .Net where programming methods also evolved from Database Management, to Relational, to Object-Oriented, and so on. My hardware also propelled me to gigabit lan, biometrics, servers, point to point, ip cam, ....

When time allows, I will post most, if not all, of my troubleshooting and setup knowledge of various solutions with computers and its cousins. All I learned through trial and error, very few but Geek mentors, and hardcore googling.