My Digital History

My Digital History

Childhood-Video Games

   "Hey Josh, can you help me with my computer?," this is the question I get asked the most from family members, friends, coworkers, and even my boss. I was exposed to computers practically my whole life, my dad was very into electronics and taking things apart and fixing them, he would always bring family members electronics and appliances home to repair them. He would eventually come to show me his first computer, which was very basic and it couldn't handle very much besides word processing or at least that's all my parents used it for. I remember my first interactions with computers was when I was 8 years old and using this very computer to play an old 2D side scrolling shooter game and from then on I was hooked I eventually moved on to play on a more powerful machine and more and more nicer looking games that varied from shooting, racing, sports, and strategic games. Video games started my passion for computers, I couldn't do much else due to me being anemic so video games were my sports, my physical activities, my dreams. I felt that I could do anything, become anything.

Middleschool- Hardware and building

      As I got a bit older I started to shift my focus from computer games to the actual components of what make up a computer. I was maybe 12-13 years old and I had never seen the inside of these metal boxes that until this point only served the purpose of me playing games. I eventually decided to take a look inside, I took a screwdriver and started to remove the side panel. Once opened I revealed a whole new world, it was such an incredible sight to see all these new weird looking parts that made up the brains of the computer. I saw wires, lights, fans, and many other parts which I did not know what they were or what they did. After seeing all of this I wanted to learn more about the components that made up the computer so I immediately told my parents to take me to the library, which was just down the street, I checked out a couple of beginner computer books and I started to learn the basics of what each part of a computer does. During this time my parents were looking into getting a new computer and the only person that they knew that could help them was my uncle who was the most computer literate person they knew. My uncle ended up convincing them that it would be cheaper for them if they just bought the parts and have him to build them the computer. When the parts finally arrived I felt more excited than I did on Christmas day. I opened everything up and thanks to my reading I knew exactly what everything was, with the help of my uncle I had built my very first computer.

Highschool-fixing computers and selling

        I had become obsessed, computers were becoming the center of my life and through this I made a lot of friends and money. I started volunteering myself to help the other students with any questions or problems they had with technology and soon I had become the go to guy for anyone that had a problem with computers, tablets, smartphones, video game systems, and anything else that had a CPU(Central Processing Unit). It got to the point where the school that I went to, which didn't have a very good computer program, started going to me for their computer issues from cleaning out viruses to upgrading all their student computers. I began to get bored of the same basic things and I just didn't feel that I could be smart enough to get into software development so I ended up falling into the dark side of technology, during my sophomore year I got into software and movie piracy, I had known about piracy for a long time and since I had no  income I even used software and movies to run the latest programs and games but until this point I kept it all for myself. I had never thought of using piracy to make money, I always felt it was too risky but one day a friend of mine approached me and asked if there were ways of getting movies for free, this was before Netflix really took over, I’m not really sure what came over me maybe the sensation of the risk or the feeling of being needed for something other than fixing a computer. I had sold my first pirated movie and I honestly didn’t feel bad about it so I continued to do it for the next several months. I made sure to keep all of this strictly with students, I was doing quite well for myself but eventually out of fear of getting caught and losing everything I decided to stop doing it all after about six months.

Post Highschool- Software and editing

     After high school I stopped focusing so much on the technical parts of the computer and I started to get more into the creative avenues of computers. I began to learn Photography and Videography but mostly sticking to the computer editing side of things like using Photoshop, After Effects, and Sony Vegas. I started moving my focus towards these because there was a need in my church for someone who could put together slideshows, and make short videos for the special events that they would plan out. As I got older and I started having more responsibilities at work and started making more money. I began to lose my focus and the passion for the one thing that I knew best started to fade away in pursuit of the easy way out. Now that I look back it’s kind of heart breaking for me to realize what I had done because maybe if I would have taken the risk of quitting my job and just kept studying computers I would have now been working with the one thing that I had ever really been good at, the one thing that made me feel like I made a difference.