Welcome to my personal website! I am a 30-something retro tech enthusiast living in middle America.
I reside in a small town of less than 1000 population near the college town that I grew up in. I share a living space with my longtime partner and our two pets.
I work two jobs and do some freelance computer maintenance on the side. Outside of work, I value my free time and aspire to live frugally.
I recommend viewing this website on a lower resolution monitor or mobile device, otherwise you may want to turn up the zoom on your browser! You should also disable any dark mode extensions for this site, I've tried to account for DarkReader but it has been iffy in certain cases.
This place functions as a hub for all the different things I've put out into the world that are worth sharing. I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to learn a bit about HTML/CSS, but in this particular case I opted to use more outdated coding techniques and rely partly on Microsoft FrontPage to get a feel for what making a website was like when I was a kid around the turn of the millenium.
My only real exposure to web development was summer school computer class in the early 2000s. We used Microsoft Publisher to design a simple webpage, and while I enjoyed the experience—I still have the CD-ROM that we saved everything on—I was never able to find an outlet where I could take the next step. I made some Freewebs sites and Invisionfree forums as a teenager, but very little coding knowledge was involved and I never took the time to ensure that they would be preserved.
Since I was too young and apparently busy, my experience with the wild west internet was limited in scope. It probably didn't help that I had very few tech influences in my life growing up, my family had dial up internet at the house well into the 2000s and didn't keep the old computer around when the new operating system would come out.
It might've taken 20 years, but I'm finally getting to experience the joys of unconstrained, unpolished self-expression on the internet. The unified design aesthetic of the modern web feels drab and boring after so long. I love the colorful whimsy of the old web, all the low resolution animated gifs, tiled backgrounds and ugly fonts. So, I hope you'll excuse me if this doesn't end up being the most professional or visually appealing website on the internet. I can live with it! I'm learning a skill, expanding my creativity and living out an experience that I should have had long ago.
For a rundown of my interests, check out the interests page. If you're curious about the various things I've put out into the world wide web, head over to see my stuff. If you want to gain an insight on my rambling thoughts, feel free to visit the personal page. I added a directory page for all the various outbound links that I want to share with the visitors of this site. I also have a blog page outside of this website where I endeavor to write about technology in an original, thought-provoking way.
I settled on rootCompute as my internet alias because I think it expresses concisely what I'm all about.
Tinkering with vintage computers has become a pasttime for me. I still enjoy using CRT displays and old Windows machines, trying out old programs and games that I used to love or never got to experience. I have a keen interest in computers from the Windows 9x era, but I wouldn't mind trying out any retro machine regardless of how old it is.
I also enjoy learning to use Linux more effectively and have always been a big fan of open source and lesser known software. I can never forget my roots.
The following styles are preferred: rootCompute rootCompute:\ rootCompute:/ rC:\ rC:/ rootcompute