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Lost Innocence

When I built my first system in 1998, I was pretty impressed with how easy things were. Basically I just plugged things in, clicked through a few screens, and everything worked. The hardest part was figuring out how the motherboard fit into the chassis. (Pat and I scratched our heads over all those metal widgets for a couple of hours, to be sure.)

But everything else was idiot-proof. You couldn't even plug anything in backwards. It was great. We were up and running Starcraft in no time.

I had heard that in the bad old days, building a computer was difficult. For Serious Enthusiasts Only. But along came standards. Plug 'N Play, USB, huzzah!

Things seemed to be working reasonably well three years ago. I assumed things would be the same today. Oh, well.

The only thing certain to remain constant -- my own naivete.

Posted by Evan Goer on Oct. 26, 2001 at 8:37 PM