Servers and DIY Web Hosting - Intro Anecdote

The first computer that I could unequivocally call mine was, and I'm not kidding, half of an old Dell workstation that I found at a junkyard as a kid with my dad, back when "the computer" was a place that you went to in your home. I was maybe 10 or 11 years old and barely remember this, but it was just sitting there on the ground and I asked my dad if I could take it home and see if I could do something with it. It had no hard drive and the case was missing the front panel and side door leaving the insides exposed to the elements, but I enjoyed tinkering and fixing things and thought I could make it come alive.

I took it home, found a power cable, plugged it in, tried to turn it on, and absolutely nothing happened. It had no physical power button, so I remember having to figure out how to bridge the power button pins on the motherboard to simulate a button press and panicking because I thought I broke it even further. I had been reading about computers in places like PC Magazine, GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly, and I picked up a basic understanding of the components and how they individually made up the whole of the machine, and thinking that if the computer is not receiving power, then power is not being supplied, which means the power supply is not functioning.

This felt like a big realization for my young self, and I was pretty sure that I was right, so I asked my dad to take me to Staples to buy probably the cheapest and worst quality power supply that existed at the time. My dad is a tradesman and pretty handy, so I remember talking to him about it and him saying that it makes sense, and if it is totally dead we can just return the power supply anyway. We got it, brought it home and I slapped it into the rejected half-Dell. It turned on.

My dad grabbed a spare older CRT monitor from the basement, and once we hooked it up we were able to see the BIOS in all it's American Megatrends glory. This is where the project stalled for what felt like maybe forever, but I'm sure it was only a matter of weeks or maybe months. I still didn't have a hard drive, so I couldn't do anything else but pine over the possibility of having my own computer. I remember going through one of the aforementioned issues of PC Magazine and circling PC parts that I wanted with a pen. Eventually I was able to convince my parents to buy me a 40GB Western Digital drive, which felt incomprehensibly huge but really wasn't even for the time. Looking it up today, this drive probably retailed around $90 new (or $150 in 2025 post apocalyptic money) which isn't terrible but probably why I didn't get very many Christmas presents that year.

All in all, by dumpster diving and scrounging together spare parts, my parent's got me a computer for maybe $130 out of their own pocket so why not? I was putting it all together and making it work, I think they enjoyed that I enjoyed it and wanted to foster my curiosity. I believe that actions like these are probably some of the best things that a parent can do for their kid, and honestly this PC did a lot to allow me to find my interests and develop passions that have stayed with me even into adulthood.

I ended up installing Windows 2000 on the Dell, only because that's what my dad happened to have lying around at his office. I still didn't have an internet connection in my bedroom, so I would shuffle data back and forth on floppy and Zip drives and became intimately familiar with WinZip so I could make each transfer as substantial as possible. Eventually I moved on to CD-RWs and my world opened up immensely. I could finally play all of my games in my own room instead of hogging the family PC, have my own digital space, and modify things to see what happened without pissing off anyone aside from myself. This made me feel a sense of freedom that was very new to me and genuinely exciting.

In the time since, I have never made a new computer outright and have always reused parts when updating and upgrading. Sometimes it's a massive jump, but parts linger between iterations, and because of that it's still the same entity that I found in a junkyard with my dad and brought home. Skipping forward almost 25 years, I think I could argue that I'm still actually using the same computer by way of Theseus. It's my computer. I genuinely think that is beautiful.

I wasn't sure where I was going to end up when I started writing this intro, probably breaking down my current system and all the things I host with the minutia of my hardware and software decisions explained, but I'm glad I ended up where I did. It sets the tone and encapsulates how I think about my relationship with technology fairly well, and does a lot to explain the nature of a Long Project like this that is the culmination of endless learning and tinkering.