What I Inherited, What I Rewrote

A reflection on building things by hand, outgrowing what you inherited, and making tech your own.

When I left for college in 1999, all I wanted was the new tangerine iMac. You know the one. Round, colorful, impossibly cool. It looked like the epitome of swagger I was chasing as a 17 year old living in the suburbs.

Everyone I knew was obsessed. Mac had this almost mythical status… like if you had one, you were on the cutting edge of something. You were someone.

But college is expensive. My family didn’t have the money to buy a brand-new, neon-glazed Apple anything.

So my dad – who’d been working in tech since the 80s and had a knack for making things work – took me to the computer junk store. You know the place… the kind with bins full of orphaned parts and tangled power cords.

We spent the afternoon digging. A tower. A screen. Drives. RAM. Bits and pieces that didn’t look like much on their own. And together, on the beige-carpeted floor of our spare room, we built a computer. Not sleek. Not orange. But powerful. And it had something the Mac didn’t have...

I was the only kid in my dorm…