Subj : Re: Hi all!
To   : Digital Man
From : Nightfox
Date : Sun Aug 31 2025 02:03 pm

  Re: Re: Hi all!
  By: Digital Man to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 2025 01:54 pm

 DM> Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and
 DM> LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I
 DM> hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they
 DM> "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC
 DM> components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've
 DM> learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away from
 DM> turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building computers, it
 DM> was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had to know how to
 DM> use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of a "Winchester"
 DM> controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know the differences
 DM> between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks, cyclinders and clusters
 DM> and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't
 DM> "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was and why it mattered.

Yeah, when I got my first computer, I learned about low-level formatting the hard drive, and also having to occasionally re-scan it to mark (new) bad sectors as the drive continued to develop problems (and I think that also required backing up, re-formatting and restoring my backup, as it would then be aware of the new marked bad sectors); also I was familiar with using jumpers to configure IRQ addresses for my various expansion cards & such.  Part of the reason I know all of that was because my first computer was a hand-me-down 286 with a MFM hard drive (I got it in 1992).  I was 12 years old at that time..  When I got my first job in 1996, the first thing I spent my first paycheck(s) on was parts to build a brand-new computer, and by then, PCs were using IDE hard drives, which (from what I remember) didn't require low-level formatting or marking bad sectors anymore.  Expansion cards were still using jumpers to set IRQs, but by then, the only expansion cards I remember having were a Sound Blaster card and a video card, as the motherboard had the I/O built-in.  Motherboards were still using jumpers to configure things like the bus speed and multiplier for the CPU clock speed & such.  But as we know, jumpers eventually went away, and now it's quite a bit simpler to build a PC.

 DM> Nowadays,
 DM> all those details are abstracted away from the system builder. And the
 DM> software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one
 DM> person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough
 DM> to have a job in the field. I enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when
 DM> I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way
 DM> they are. But I also feel bad that they may not really retain the
 DM> knowledge since they didn't "live it" and that could be a big handicap for
 DM> the generation(s) taking over.

Yeah, I feel similar.

Nightfox
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