How many fingers do you have left....?

IceDigger

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When you first started building computers and rarely came through unscathed after a build finger wise....

How many fingers do you have left? How many battle scars do you have?

How many pints of blood did you leave in the case?
 
Haha! When I first started out with the cases in the 90s that was normal.

The new cases are much much more forgiving on your fingers.

Am I showing my age? :(
 
Back in the 1990's when I started building PC's, some of the cheaper cases didn't roll the edges of the sheet metal. I cut **** near to the bone on one of my knuckles fishing out a screw that fell behind the front panel. It's like the edges were made of steak knives. My hands have all kinds of tiny scars from working on PC's, cars, guns etc. Modern cases are made so much better that this isn't much of a concern. Having said that, I still occasionally get stabbed by a solder point on a motherboard or cut myself building systems for friends. I try not to let them buy cheap cases but every once in awhile I grab something just right or scrape my hand or fingers enough to draw blood during a build.
 
I used to go nuts with a dremel tool back in the 90s and early 2000's. I could never find a case that had enough fan mounts so I had to make my own. I never filed down anything because I hated how that sounded/felt. I don't know how I survived. It seemed like every build, I would just be working and then notice I have blood running down my fingers from some random cut that was so clean that I didnt even feel it.
 
I have a pretty good scar on my left thumb from a cheap 1990's computer case. Considering the shops I worked at during that time almost exclusively dealt in higher-end quality cases, I came away pretty unscathed.
 
If you havent gotten sliced up at some point you didnt go ghetto enough with mods.
 
As Dan pointed out in the early days some PC case metal edges were not rolled over.

I was leaving a LAN party with my tower PC that had no lid.
It had been raining and the ground was wet so I didn't want to put my PC down.
While trying to open the car door the PC was resting on my knee, when I lost my balance.
As the PC starting falling I caught it by grabbing one of the side frames hard and somehow cut a huge chunk off the top of a finger.
That hurt, blood was everywhere. It ruined my fingerprint.
It looked quite strange for a few years but eventually healed so well I cant even remember which finger it was!
I'll chop my arm off and see if it grows back, only way to find if I'm really a lizard.
 
I have building my own `puters since the 386 days and have a few battle scars and left a little blood in a few cases in the old days (I am a retired ASE Master tech and have many more scars from working on cars, big trucks and oil field equipment). Any one remember "First Saturday" in Dallas and getting there at midnight with a flashlight and going home Saturday morning or afternoon with enough used parts to build a system? Yep, those old cheap used whitebox AT cases were hand grinders full of sharp edges just waiting to chew up hands.
 
Definitely easier building in the new cases now. There were some rough edges on the earlier cases for sure.
 
I do not miss those old cases I had a case that would draw a little blood anytime you opened it.
 
I have eight fingers, thankfully. When I first began working on personal computers during the 1990's I would get all sorts of cuts. Thankfully, none of the cuts became scars. I remember the steel case that my brother had for an Athlon Thunderbird system that split the palm of my hand open when I picked it up. I do not miss the sharp edges many of those old cases had.
 
I had a Salman heatsink CNPS 9500 that was a bear to handle. Yeah it cut me a few times. I got afraid of that thing. Lol.
 
I've only built one machine myself, but I've been inside any number of machines starting with a DEC KI-10, numerous unix boxes of the '80's (mostly MC68000 based), SPARCstations, various PC's, etc. The only one I really sliced myself on was a VAX 11-780; I was trying to get at the Unibus and nearly took off a finger. Most of the hardware engineers I worked with had a nice scar collection.
 
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