Growing up in the 90s when the internet was brand new, pulling apart my dad's old Pentium III, and how a childhood obsession became a career. This is the story behind CX IT Services.
I was about ten years old when my dad brought home a Pentium III.
This was the late 90s. The internet existed, but most people still experienced it through a dial-up modem that turned the phone line into a screaming fax machine for 45 seconds before presenting you with a page that took three minutes to load. We thought that was incredible.
My dad was not particularly technical. He bought the computer because that was what you did — technology was arriving into Australian households, and parents who paid attention understood, even if they could not articulate exactly why, that their kids needed to be around it. He set it up in the living room and used it mostly for emails and whatever passed for productivity software at the time.
But eventually he upgraded. And the old machine, instead of going to a tip somewhere, ended up in my bedroom.
That was where my education actually started.
The Pentium III Education
I did not have manuals. I did not have YouTube. I had a screwdriver, curiosity, and no particular fear of breaking something that was already considered obsolete.
I pulled the thing apart. I looked at what was inside. I figured out what connected to what, what each component did in rough terms, and — crucially — I put it back together again. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not, and I had to work out why.
That process of pulling something apart and figuring out how to make it work again is, in some form, still exactly what I do every day. The hardware has changed. The complexity is vastly higher. The stakes are real — actual businesses, actual data, actual staff who need things to work. But the fundamental activity of understanding a system, diagnosing what is wrong, and restoring it to function is the same one I was doing at 14 in my bedroom.
I think that early hands-on contact with hardware gave me something that pure theory would not have. You develop an intuition for systems when you have physically handled them — when you have held the components, felt the connectors, experienced the sensation of a machine that was dead coming back to life because you found the loose RAM stick or the failed power supply. That intuition still informs how I diagnose problems now.
The 90s Internet Was Something Else
Here is what people who grew up later may not fully appreciate about the 90s internet: it was genuinely frontier territory.
There were no rules. There was no established way to do things. The people building and using the early web were figuring it out as they went, and that creative chaos produced an energy that I have never quite experienced again in technology.
I was part of the first wave of Australians who grew up online — not just using the internet as a utility, but living in it, building things in it, exploring its edges. Bulletin boards, early chat rooms, the first versions of what would eventually become social media. We were participating in something that we sensed was important before we could articulate why.
I remember the specific feeling of a page loading on a 56k modem — watching the image render line by line from top to bottom — and thinking: this is going to change everything. I was not wrong.
What I could not have predicted is that I would spend the next three decades working to help Australian businesses get the most out of a technology landscape that has continued to change faster than most organisations can adapt to.
From Passion to Profession
The passion came first. The career came second.
I did not decide to go into IT because I calculated that it was a good industry with stable employment prospects and reasonable remuneration. I went into it because I was obsessed with it. I wanted to spend my days working with technology, solving problems in it, building things with it.
That distinction matters more than people think. The people I have watched struggle in this industry are the ones who came to it as a career path rather than a calling. Technology changes too fast and demands too much genuine engagement for a transactional relationship with it to hold up over time. You cannot fake interest in this work for thirty years.
I have never had a Monday morning where I was not genuinely interested in what was waiting for me.
What I Know Now That I Did Not Know Then
Starting out, I believed that if you were technically excellent, everything else would follow. If you solved the problems well, clients would be happy. If the systems worked, the business worked.
I was wrong about this in important ways.
Technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient. The businesses I see struggle most with technology are not struggling because their provider lacks technical skill — they are struggling because the relationship lacks trust, communication, and shared understanding of what the technology is actually for.
A client who does not understand what their IT provider is doing, and why, and what it is protecting them from, will always be anxious about the cost. They have no framework for evaluating whether they are getting value. The anxiety makes the relationship fragile.
I learned — slowly, through experience rather than instruction — that the most important thing an IT provider can do is help clients understand their own technology environment. Not just manage it. Explain it. Contextualise the decisions. Connect the investment to the outcomes it is producing.
That realisation changed how we operate at CX IT Services. The technical work is the same. The communication around it is completely different from how most IT providers approach it.
Why I Am Still Here
Thirty years in, people sometimes ask whether I have lost the excitement for it.
I have not. If anything, the technology landscape right now is more interesting than it has ever been. AI is doing things that would have seemed like science fiction when I was pulling apart that Pentium III. Cybersecurity has become genuinely sophisticated on both sides — the attacks are more capable, and so are the defences. The cloud infrastructure underpinning most Australian businesses today would have been incomprehensible infrastructure to the 90s internet pioneers.
I get to work at the intersection of all of it — technology, business, strategy, security — and help real businesses navigate it. The ten-year-old who pulled apart his dad’s computer is still, fundamentally, doing exactly that work. It is just more consequential now.
If you are an Australian business owner trying to figure out your technology — what you need, what you do not, what the risks are, and how to get the most out of what you have — that is exactly the problem I built CX IT Services to help you solve.
