How did you learn about computers?

[Novicecomputeruser]

Books, websites, people

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I learned with roughly 20% Internet but 80% getting stuck in and doing it.

 

[R_1]

MaximumPC magazine. had a subscription for years, then went to school.
Toms hardware of course, lockergnome, and arstechnica were daily must visits for years.

 

[genthug]

Mom got me into it when I was ~14-15. At the time I didn't know anything about it other than that I wanted a gaming PC to play WoW on. For my birthday she and I (mostly her tho tbh) built a custom PC for me to use. I wasn't all that into it up until I hit college when I got a lot more interested in it (due to it being 5 years old I needed to start tinkering with it to give it some more usage) and she helped me out with that. Since then it's been more of myself looking online into things more than just basic computer building.

 

[utroz]

A lot of reading books (before I had internet), IRC and BBS, 20 years of trial and error, 3 years of high school vocational tech programs, 2 years of college, and countless hours reading online forums (the internet made life so easy). I make a point to learn new things everyday. The more I learn about computers and tech, the more I realize how little I actually know.. My first computer was a Packard Bell 486 SX-25 with 4MB Ram soldered to the motherboard, no sound, no cd-rom, no modem. I was around 10 years old and my father and I began to learn about computers together and had many father son projects upgrading this system. We first bought two 16MB 72pin Simm (big bucks back then) for a total of 36MB of ram, then we bought a Sound Blaster CD-ROM combo as the motherboard IDE did not support them. After that we bought a modem and added a secondary 420MB hard drive to the main 210MB Hard Drive (the board could not support much larger due to bios limitations without using workarounds and other trickery). We then bought a dox matrix printer, a joystick for my flight simulator, and a network card. We also upgraded the CPU several times starting with a DX-33, then DX2-66, and finally a DX4-100. We installed cache on the motherboard (256KB or 512KB?). By this time he wanted a faster system and we then built a K6-266 system in an actual tower and I inherited the 486 system. We upgraded it from windows 3.11 to windows 95. The problem then was having only one phone line to use dial-up internet so we bought a program called Wingate which allowed me to use the internet connection over our 10Mbps Ethernet lan (with an 8 port hub) from his system. My friends thought it was the coolest thing as we could play some of the first network games like Warcraft 1 and 2. Soon after this a company in the area upgraded all its office computers and I acquired 10 486 DX2-66 systems of all types. So I made my own computer lab in the basement and cannibalized about half of the systems to make the rest much faster and better. I was 12 years old and the envy of many of my friends who would all come over so play games as there was enough computer for everyone. I got my first job working on a farm and saved all my money and built a K6-II 400Mhz system which was a quantum leap from the 486 systems. I learned so much from that system and upgraded it many times. by the end I was running a K6-III+ 450 @ 560Mhz which was my first cpu with on die L2 cache making the motherboards 2MB of L2 cache an L3 cache (first system with L3 I owned). I had up to 768MB of PC-133 CL2 RAM (started at PC-100 CL3 64MB and then started only buying 256MB PC-133 CL2 crucial sticks, a Geforce4 Ti4600 128MB video card, a Sound Blaster Live!, an Iwill PCI SIDE 66 RAID card, an Adaptec 50pin SCSI controller, an Intel Pro 100 network card, a DVD-ROM as well as a CD Burner, a Yamaha PSR 220 keyboard hooked up to the gameport/midi port to help make midi music files, and lots of hard drives (at one point around 6 IDE and 5 SCSI drives as I used many cheap to free small hard drives so I could have different OS's without risking any important data. I loved that system so much and it was a great teacher in trouble shooting computer problems. I was overloading my PSU at boot up because of too many hard drives and had to learn how to stagger the spin up of my SCSI drives to fix the problem. Anyways the long and short of it is use as many resources as you can and start doing new things that you have never done with computers and you will learn all sorts of interesting, useful, and odd skills.

 

[Barty1884]

I didn't actually get into it seriously really until around 3 years ago, so luckily the internet was a valuable resource available to me.
This forum has helped refine my knowledge too.

I knew the basics from learning from a couple of family friends growing up, I guess I was around 10 (so late 90's) when I started asking questions and understanding the basics.

Getting your hands dirty (after learning the basics) is the only real was to learn. I started with some basic upgrades (HDDs, GPUs, coolers etc) and moved up to building rigs.

Built my first rig from scratch around 2 years ago and have built probably 10-15 for friends, fun or profit since, along with numerous full-scale upgrades etc.