Evolution of the HTPC

HTPC or Home Theatre PC's have been on the market for quite some time and my first attempt at building a "silent" computer back in 2004 failed miserably. I had spent a considerable amount of time sort of researching, and bought a $200 Silverstone full size HTPC case, model LC03

I added a 500W fanless PSU which cost almost the same as the case, and then started selecting the core components based around an ASUS motherboard and PCIe video card and an ATI HDTV Wonder complete with it's own antenna to pick up ATSC digital signals.

This first HTPC was an expensive but educational exercise, a success in that it did what it was supposed to do, stream movies to our TV, play music through our amplifier, pick up the single ATSC channel at the time, which was City TV from Toronto and it could also be a DVD player.

It was a failure because it could not be silent. The fanless PSU produced a lot of latent heat and I had to have a case fan running with a speed control to keep the heat down. In addition, the CPU fan added it's own little slice of low level noise, plus the quiet, yet noticeable hum of the hard drive.

In a quiet home theatre environment, my first HTPC sounded like a freight train.

There's always a first post.

Welcome to the Old Tech Geezer, a blog I've been meaning to start for many years and a topic that has been close to my heart now for four decades. I've grown old playing around with computers and tech, and it's about time that I documented some of the joy in playing with the stuff, old and new.

I'll start when I left school, I don't see the point in discussing my Etch-A-Sketch.

Here's the first piece of kit that graced my palm, the type 3 Sinclair Cambridge calculator I bought in the West end of London in November of 1974 :

The Sinclair Cambridge cost me about sixteen quid at the time when I was earning thirteen a week before my "expenses" and it was already an obsolete model by the time I could afford it. That's the story of my life I will say, that whenever tech arrived in my life, others had been enjoying it for a year or more before it entered my life.

The Cambridge I owned had an interesting quirk, if you divided stuff by zero, it would go off into an endless counting mode, a function that would keep my small brain amused for hours.

In addition of course, you could spell BOOBS with it.