Still 22 today and I feel as old as the computer I first built, it was an Pentium MMX @ 200Mhz machine built around a socket 7 Asus motherboard and a Matrox Millenium 4MB. I remember all I had with that was constant pain of losing hard drives to bad sectors over and over again.
Have fond memories of playing Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit, The Sims, MDK, CnC's up to Red Alert 2, Unreal, Quake II, Deus Ex (just re-installed, because there is a saying if someone mentions Deus Ex they re-install it), Forsaken, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, Recoil, MechWarrior 3, MechCommander (what happened to this IP?), Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Resident Evil 2 and 3, StarCraft, Theme Hospital, Worms: Armageddon and I could go on. (I've only found out about other classics much later.)
Internet was crappy ADSL2+, but it was enough, not for online gaming though, So I always play offline even now when I have access to 300mb/s, mostly because I don't want to play online anymore, it was new back then, now almost every game has a multi-player component readily available so I don't find it impressive.
That one pathetic rig I built in 2004 out of scrap parts, gave me so much joy, because very rarely I could get to play video games on a computer, it was restricted to me as much as possible, since I didn't study well in school for personal reasons.
My real understanding of software and hardware only came about 4 years later though when I started to dabble in overclocking, creating and modding for the platform.
If it wasn't for computers my life would be completely different than what it is now.
It's mostly all thanks to my dad, because, he's been into computers way longer than me, but I have to surpassed him in knowledge of current technology, so it's now me teaching stuff, not only to him but even other people close to me.
It's funny to think about how most of this won't matter to future generations though, if it doesn't already. Now mobile phones are basically a computer with a different architecture that can do similar things to a PC if it has the software and hardware to do it. I wonder what will be the replacement for the x86 architecture, I could rant about it, I could rant about many things that are bad for consumers, but it won't change anything, because this train never stops.
But I've fallen into nostalgia for too long already. So I will leave it at that.
There's even a story how I found myself here in TPU. But that is a story for another day.
