It’s a page about all my computer desks!

In 1997, I fullfilled my dream of building myself my first custom desk by having two 4′ x 8′ sheets of wood shipped to my house by the local hardware store. Here’s how it turned out:

I tried to make everything I owned fit perfectly into the shelves. The picture is hard to see because it was taken with an old 80’s-style video camera and transferred to the computer via a serial device called a Snappy. That’s the closest thing I had to a digital camera at the time.

On the top holds a printer and a flatbed scanner. On the next shelf down, you can see books, paper trays, speakers and an amplifier. There’s also the circuit board of a 28.8kbps modem mounted on the inside which was used for receiving faxes. The third shelf has a digital answering machine/caller ID display combo and then a speaker phone next to it. It was just the speaker and had no means of dialing out. The next shelf down held a tape deck which was strictly for recording telephone calls. And below that is a zip drive (100 megs per disk!), a few spare zip disks and a bunch of cassette tapes. There’s also a telephone mounted on the side. Above the desk is a U.S. map with area codes hand-written on it and stars to indicate PLA distribution sites.

The computer is a 486. The monitor started overheating, causing the picture to go nuts. So I ended up taking the entire back off of it and mounting a fan on top. Every time the picture would start jumping, we’d turn on the fan and it would stop.

My desk started out as an old turquoise kitchen table. Eventually I decided I needed a hutch on it so I stacked milk crates on top. I screwed them together to keep them from toppling over and added a wooden shelf in the middle to hold my amplifier. You can see a few more pictures of this desk on my Pepsi page.

These are both basically the same desks, but in different rooms. The bottom part is just a regular small desk that somebody gave me. The top hutch part was built by me. It looks like I rearranged the shelves inside the hutch to fit the new 386 computer that we bought. (Like the Beavis and Butthead screen saver?) In the wooden room is where we had our daily adventures with Big Larry. You’ll also notice two phones mounted to the desk in that room. One of them was attached to Big Larry’s phone line and the stereo on the shelf could record his phone calls.