Making Tech Money in the 90's

 

     Let's be honest. Making money on technology in the 90's and early 2000's was insanely easy. I'll explain how I made enough money to open my own business while in college, how I made money even in high school, and the skills you needed to be able to do it.

     Years before LGR was building his dream rigs from Ebay hand picked parts, my friends and I were Macintosh gamers and soft hackers, thinking we owned the world and everything was for us. We had limited tech knowledge, but school gave us multiple opportunities to expand our skills, and we always knew someone that was throwing away an old computer. DOS gaming always seemed more primitive to what we had on the Macintosh, with having to navigate command lines and different kinds of ram management, and typically there was a Mac version of the game we wanted, and it ran better on our systems anyway. Needless to say, all of the experience I had working on PC's was 90% Macintosh related.. and they rarely broke. Macintosh was the premium, more expensive option, and they were very upgradeable. Schools used them, everything was easy to install. Plug this in, press this button, ram goes here, hard drive goes there. They were all the same. It was a niche, but I didn't know anyone in my circle of friends that preferred their IMB compatible over their Macintosh.

    I realized right away that people were absolutely terrified to open their computer. In most old Macs, there was a red button on the motherboard you press to reset the computer, and it would fix most issues right away... but that would require you to take 2 screws off and slide the motherboard out of the tray and press it. I never had a Mac just not start after I put it back together after an upgrade or a reset. People starting calling on me when they heard I could take them apart, and would pay me $50-$100 just to press a button on the motherboard, or put a paperclip in the little hole to eject a floppy. I remember once, someone gave me a $100 bill to plug in a modem to the back of the computer and turn it on, and install AOL.

    When Gateway started offering dirt cheap computers locally with everything included, I knew my Mac days were numbered. My parents were early adopters and bought a top of the line Windows 95 system for the house and of course ignored it and let me do whatever I wanted with it. Like anything, I felt it was just as easy to take this apart as it was to play one of those kids games where you stick the colored shape blocks in to their corresponding holes. Literally two screws to take the case off, and the there is a the cards, board, processor, hard drive and power supply. Some small changes like plugging in sound cards, and the CDROM had to be plugged in to that, but that's not much of a learning curve. Learning DOS seemed easy after navigating an operating system if you could visualize you were accessing folders and could memorize half a dozen commands. Within a week, I felt very confident I could fix or build a DOS or Windows PC from scratch, and work on older systems. 

    I never had to buy anything. People upgraded and just tossed out their old computers, sometimes if there was nothing wrong with them. They would ask me their old PC and toss it after I just set up their new one and got them online for the first time. A few times, I brought computers home that were better than my own, and had some unique upgrades that I could use. I started collecting parts, boxes and boxes of parts. Bags of old and new ram, monitors piled up 10 deep. Cardboard boxes of mice and keyboards. I didn't even have a business card but would get 3-5 calls a week to come and replace a mouse or keyboard. 99% of the time it was just dirty, so I would take it home, clean it and bag it up for sale. I was still living at home and my closet and the hall closet became a repository for my de facto PC warehousing. I found some beige PC cases during one particularly fruitful dumpster dive, with laundry baskets full of old IBM XT and PS2 parts and software. I knew nothing about these other operating systems and computers, or how they worked. I had never seen a server in person before, but people have asked me to work on them. All of these things combined, I decided to start networking computers together on the floor of my bedroom for fun. 

     Understanding Networking on bedroom floor with 3 junk PC's all tied together was an eye opening experience. I had networked Macs together to play games over the IPX protocol, and the GEO port to play Doom against buddies, but never for Business, and definitely not on PC. It was actually not that hard, and I had so many spare parts, it was easy to learn and make my own network and get files transferring. I started taking Networking jobs as well as I started to take my first college classes, and around that time, I made my first business cards and got started making a name for myself.

Working out of my bedroom, I was taking 20-30 jobs and house calls per week, while working part time at a gas station. Those were very busy days. 50% of the jobs were old people that could not connect to AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, and needed a modem or just a quick reset or change a phone line out because it got pinched. I would charge $50 to show up, and $50 per hour if it did not require any parts. I was getting so much work I started turning the hourly jobs down in favor of the bigger ones. New PC setup was a big business then. I would recommend a computer or they would just buy it on their own from a magazine or the TV, and would call me and I would just hook it up for them and show them how to use it. I charged $150 for this service and took me an hour. Anything after an house, I told them I would have to come back and they would have to schedule another service. $150 to plug some wires in and show them how to print a picture of their grandkid and send an email. 

     The other 50% of house calls were always a burned up modem. I would carry an external US robotics modem in the car, bring that inside and if that worked and their internal one didn't, I would replace the modem. Where did I get the modems? I would buy them 25 at a time from PC Mall magazine for $8 each. The cheapest ones they had, 28.8 baud, no frills, Hayes compatible. I would charge $25 for the modem, which if you bought one at the store for $99, you knew you were getting a good deal. Some people would tell me they would get one at the store, then call me back and say just come put it in, because my fee and the cost was still lower. Remember, the only place you could buy a modem back then was at a specialty computer store that would 100% of the time charge 3 times too much and rip you off for any of the services. My local repair shop I dealt with for some diagnostic things would charge $90 an hour, minimum of 2 hours, and they would get it.

My job at the time was paying me $7.75 an hour, but reimbursed me for my college costs, and gave me free health insurance. Yes, free. I only worked 20 hours a week and if I called in to take a PC job they would never say anything because I was in a relationship with the store manager. I was able to save $20,000 in one year, and that's with buying a motorcycle, a car that I put tons of money in to make it fast, and anything I could want to have at the time. I did have distractions where I would take a few weeks off, like my ex-girlfriend sleeping with my best friend(s)? and moving in to my own place. I rented both sides of a duplex, did my PC stuff out of one side and lived in the other. $525 a month per side. 

Things started to slow down, where the only business I was getting was building new PC's and networking large jobs. It was weekly work and allowed me to save further. I got a new girlfriend and treated her to vacations and a good way of life while she was going through Hair School locally. I brought on a friend to take the jobs and he ended up buying the business from me and making it in to something great. I called an ex-girlfriend who I knew had a younger brother interested in tech and gave him all my inventory that wasn't being used for free. Wrap up below:

- Made 20k a year from 1998-2000

- Made 40k in 2001

- Made 66k in 2002 and in 2003 sold the business for 15k after taxes

Facebook is super broken - COViD19 Misinformation on a page

 

  If Facebook was a person, I would give them an angry look and clench my fists.. like really hard and look at them in a not-so-nice way. Yeah.

     The above message from Facebook is but one of many messages I've got reporting comments for "False Health Information" on news articles posted by verified local news organizations. This comment in particular, was some Microsoft paint level info graph that outlined how the Vaccine kills you, and that COViD is fake, with a picture of Biden with a swastika on his head, holding a dead baby. This post specifically, an article on the number of deaths at a local hospital, with statistics on how many people have died, listing number of those dead who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, and their age and some other random stats was very plainly said and informational. These updates were also released on the hospital's Facebook Page the same day for everyone to take a look at. It was very easy to see how this would go very, very wrong. Yes, I live in Florida. 

Sad right? Not according to Karen it's not! Thanks Biden.

     Instead of worrying about the dead piled up like cordwood in the parking lots at the hospital, which there are pictures of in said news story of refrigerated trailers with steel drawers full of bodies; anti-vaxxers swarm to the comments to post their rhetoric and extreme conspiracy theories on the full transparent stats released by the hospital group. The comments range from racist to just cruel and horrible, and then back again. See some examples below:

Like my Scribbles of Protection +1?

     I copied and pasted those from that very same article. On other posts there are tons of YouTube links, garbage links to bogus medical websites, and fake info graphs saying millions of people have died thanks to the Vaccine. Lots of housewives posting things like, "I know someone..", and then some bullshit story about how they died or worse from getting vaccinated. I see one wonderful example of a human explaining to all that will hear how to take horse paste safely, and how to give it to your children. When I click on these accounts, they have no public information, do not live in the South Florida Area, and only history on the internet is constant and very consistent posts on social media articles. As a matter of fact, the same 20 or so people have been commenting on every post with dumb opened ended questions, never replying when called out, but are VERY consistent. I followed one gentlemen and reported all his fake health and science posts, over 20 on different pages, and his terrorist comments that he going to cause unrest, and every single time I got a message like the above, that Facebook would NOT take the posts down, that they do not go against their posting policy. However, according to Facebutt and other sources, they are working taking these accounts down.  More lies? I think so. 

Zuck Data Accumulator 5000 powers on for the first time.

     I have some questions. Does Facebook give a fuck anymore? I can't go a single day without seeing an article make national news that Facebook is getting tough on misinformation. Bullshit. Full fucking bullshit. Facebook is contacting news outlets and writing their own stories. I'm telling you, there are doing NOTHING to remove the false information, fake accounts and terriorist-like health threats on their platform. I report them all. Nothing. Someone is literally selling horsepaste on the Facebook Marketplace, I reported it every time I saw it, and it's still there. The same 20ish people, posting on every single thing with garbage questions with a questionable Facebook profile. Even "famous" people are getting in on it. 

This guy is a fucking loser.

     JP Sears, the guy who made Youtube videos making fun of vegans, gluten intolerance, and the whole crunchy hippie essential oil culture is using his social media following to promote anti-vax statements, and anti-government propaganda. The comments are pure lunacy, with every kind of conspiracy theory you could dream of. The Adventures of Baron Von Munchhausen seems tame compared to this. News sites have been picking up on his garbage, but no one seems to care. His youtube videos stay up, and every discussion he starts about the subject does not get removed. He is spreading misinformation to millions of people per day, and no one is doing anything about it. He even has a post that has a full discussion thread on where his followers are going to meet and carry out "Civil Unrest". At the time of this writing, people in the comments are organizing meeting up, which guns they are going to bring, and where they are "Going to hit next." What the fuck? I can't make this up, click the link above and look at the replies. Some people, once fans of his sarcastic dead pan videos, have taken to the comments as well to ask what in the hell is going on. 

See something missing from this graphic? Its only 75%. That's because the other 25% not represented are absolutely out of their fucking minds. 

     Confirmation bias is the elephant in the room.. right? Call them what you want. Trumpers/Anti-Vax/Anti-science/Conspiracy Theorists.. etc. They all have one thing in common: Extreme confirmation bias. The people that want to believe something that is not true or supported by known research and science with interpret, translate and only recall the things the things that support their belief in said thing. Not to be outdone, scientists have been researching and drawing conclusions on the beliefs on confirmation bias, and how to mitigate that when dealing with the vaccine. These scientists are under the firm assumption that we can clear up this bias with enough education and transparency, which is just fine, but they forgot one thing: That Facebook Anti-vaxxers are an entirely different breed of fucking stupid. CDC, hold my beer.

Let's wrap this up. 

    Darwin is smiling down from above as the world fixes itself, which in a way is cruel magnificent poetic justice; Karma for the ones that believe it. The ultimate way to prove a point is here for the taking, just remove the ones that do not conform in perpetual eventuality. Flawed decisions from organizational, financial and faux-science contexts blurs reality on a massive scale we have never seen before. Social media's filter bubble only showing the people what they are interested in, ironically mostly just displaying something they are likely to agree with, which are rarely opposing viewpoints. The technology of social media let's you herd in with like-minded folks, where you don't have to understand any other point of view, or care for that matter. This in particular has hurt society on a scale that no one expected, except maybe Bill Gates. 

Get vaxxed fuckers!