EPTMy first credit card was a Citibank Visa card with a $2,000 limit. Looking back, I was definitely not responsible enough to have that much credit extended to me, but I was working, and I figured I wouldn't have any problem paying off this fairly small amount of debt. Spend $2,000, pay a couple hundred dollars off every month, no problem, right?
I wasn't able to play as much Starcraft in my free time as I would have liked, because my sister competed with me for time on the family's refurbished HP Pentium II 233. I still remember to this day that it took 31 - 34 seconds for Starcraft to load on that computer, because I would sit staring at the loading screen, feeling like it took for ever to load, and often counting out the seconds until I could hit that Multiplayer choice in the menu.
I decided that I would build myself a computer and pay for it with my credit card. I really didn't know much about computer hardware at the time, I only knew how to program them. Since I had gotten this idea in my head though, I had been reading computer hardware articles at Sharky Extreme, way back before it was bought by a corporation, at Anand Tech, when he was just a skinny kid, at HardOCP when Kyle did all his reviews in his living room and had viking funerals for motherboards, and at ArsTechnica, when it was just as offbeat as it is now.
I realized it would be a pretty simple deal to get together the hardware and build myself a lean beast of a machine. If I remember correct, it was a Pentium III 450 paired with a Soyo 6BA+IV motherboard, 128MB of RAM, a 10 GB IBM hardrive (which later failed on me), and a Monster MX300 sound card. I can't for the life of me remember what video card I bought, but I think it was an early nVidia card. I never owned any of the Voodoo cards that were popular then. All the hardware cost me about $1,000, maybe a tad more, which was a pretty good deal at the time.
Now, if I had told my parents at the time that I was going to build myself a computer to keep in my room and play Starcraft with, they would have pretty much disowned me. So instead, to make things go smoothly, I realized that I could just tell them I was building it to do programming. I was still going to school for Comp Sci, though now I was doing it at Palm Beach Community College and it was called IT Systems. They went along with it, and actually thought it was pretty cool.
When I finally got all the hardware, it took me about 2 days to put it all together, get it to boot (those slot 1 CPUs really felt like they were seated when they were not), and figure out how to install the operating system for the first time. I remember the joy of seeing Starcraft boot up in a mere 5 seconds.
My Starcraft machine was complete. Now I could play Starcraft safely from the privacy of my own bedroom without worrying about my sister or my parents interrupting. So nice. I played more Starcraft and got less sleep those next couple weeks than I had in a long time. I didn't really have many online friends at the time on Bnet, I just played the occasional game with my buddy from Best Buy, and lots of random pubbies. For one beautiful day I was #778 on the Battle.Net ladder, and my icon had numbers on it.
