Welcome to Growing Up Geek , an ongoing feature where we have a look back at our youth and tell stories of growing as much as be the nerds that we’re. Today, now we have the Editor in Chief of HotHardware , Dave Altavilla.
Growing up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts has its pluses and minuses. Certainly, in the summertime time, being so with regards to the seaside made for amazing boyhood memories on the beach, but inside the off season that you must find how to keep yourself busy. My fascination with technology and computers began with an Atari 2600. Then it was called a “Video Computer System,” but now we know better. That joystick marked it so much more similar to a console, but don’t hold that against me. Regardless, many hours were logged in at the Atari in scenic South Yarmouth, at the very least when it wasn’t a beach day or if Dad wasn’t heading all the way down to the harbor.
If you have ever watched Discovery’s “Deadliest Catch” (and who hasn’t?), that was more often than not the life my Dad lead, a minimum of for a decade or so. Though he was a stone and brick mason by trade, being a Capey (as we affectionately love to call ourselves, but you cannot…) Dad got bitten by the fishing bug. He was a Lobsterman for approximately ten years, probably the precise ten of my boyhood. On weekends and summer days off from school, i’d go together with Dad to the Saquatucket Harbor in Harwich, MA. Sure, I played some ball and whatnot round the neighborhood just like the other kids did, but at “Satchweetucket,” as Dad prefer to call it, that’s where the magic was. Dad would work on his boat, a 55 footer or so, with a crew of as much as three sometimes, and that i would explore. I made my very own fish stories. The scup, fluke, dogfish and eels weren’t safe. And in between fishing there has been all kinds of trouble to get into, let alone colorful people and other fishermen to satisfy round the docks.
For Dad it was a difficult, gritty gig, but he loved it. I went on a couple of trips with him when the waters were mostly calm. i’ve been out in ten foot seas. Even on a 55 foot boat, you get slammed around like a pinball. Somehow I discovered how to not barf continuously. He navigated 50 footers and survived, just barely, greater than once. If there has been ever a lesson I learned from Dad, it was about toughing it out and “building character,” as he liked to name it. And from my saint-like mother, I learned tolerance and acceptance, as she stayed home taking good care of me and my two sisters, with an Italian mother’s love and residential cooking.
The masonry and construction work I helped Dad with was also back-breaking for sure. Going up a ladder with a 100 pound chimney flue on my shoulder when it was 95°F within the shade, he’d say “that’s why you are going to college, right?” You bet my tired, ragged ass i used to be.
I went to Fitchburg State College. It wasn’t Harvard or MIT, but hey, we were working-class folks and college on the time was a piece tedious to me. Fitchburg State had three primary solid programs back then, Business, Nursing and Communications. Though i used to be a Business major (zzzz… where is the keg party tonight?), I hung around with most of the Communications types and had a great job on the college radio station as a day DJ. 91.3FM – WXPL – “pray for waves.” It was the thick of the 80s. Depeche Mode, New Order, Gang of 4 – all of the good things. Oh, and that i was Class President all four years that I attended, though I ran unopposed for 2 of them. I wasn’t much of a political candidate and albeit i feel most people were more occupied with when or where the subsequent party was anyway.
Regardless, little did i do know that my Communications experience back then, though my degree was in Business, would help me loads in a while in life. Out of school i used to be fortunate enough to land a task from an ad I answered within the Boston Globe ‘Help Wanted’ section. I spent the subsequent 17+ years within the semiconductor industry in various sales roles and that is when the tech bug bit me as hard as fishing got a hold of father. I built my first computer sometime across the early 90s. It was a 486DX-33. Yeah baby. i am unable to recall what the harddisk size was however it was probably around several GBs, with 128MB of RAM. It was the pre-Pentium era. I had a Vesa Local Bus video card in there (Tseng Labs?) and my favorite games were Wing Commander from Origin and F15-E Stike Eagle from Microprose.
We had 14.4K modems as I recall, and that i played co-op missions with a buddy of mine over that modem, in case you can believe that. There has been no internet back then, but gaming kept us connected. We even had in-game chat. Pure sweetness. There has been no turning back from there. I educated myself about computers, intimately, from a hardware perspective, a lot in order that it was becoming a costly hobby with each new generation of technology and the inevitable upgrade. At one point, a small online reseller friend of mine sent me a motherboard to take a look at, after which helped me setup a static HTML website that i made a decision to call “Hot Hardware.” The vision back then was to check, evaluate and review the most up to date computer hardware available on the market. Slowly but steadily the business took off and that i met my right hand man Marco Chiappetta, who offered to assist with the testing and writing.
Dave, Marco and fabulous folks from Intel, Western Digital and Asus
Today we’ve greatly expanded our team of writers at HotHardware.com, in addition to our product coverage scope, however the mission is a similar. We’re all technology and computing enthusiasts at heart, whether at the desktop, laptop or in our pockets.
Dave Altavilla and Wallace Santos, CEO of MainGear Computers
i attempt to keep our small team curious about two primary goals: delivering the fitting site experience we will be able to for our readers, in addition to delivering the simplest, fair and objective product evaluations and tech analysis we will. We also love to give back to the community besides and hold monthly sweepstakes, where folks can win full gaming and multimedia PCs, only for hanging out with us and joining the conversation. Moving forward, we are hoping to bring folks more of an identical, only bigger and higher.
HotHardware’s reviews and breaking news coverage have been regularly featured on Engadget. HH makes a speciality of in-depth coverage with just the correct quantity of technical detail for the die-hard geek, but not most that the mainstream enthusiast is left slack-jawed and drooling. Dave also is one of the vital geeks that host the weekly “Two and a Half Geeks” webcast at HotHardware, which include Marco Chiappetta and Iyaz Aktar .
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