Why I Did It

The History and Motivation

The motivation behind this project was born from the desire to connect my two home computers together.

It all started back in 1980 when my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III 16k computer with a tape drive. He quickly turned it over to me (actually I took it over) an I began tinkering with programming BASIC. I quickly got bored with the tape drive and I decided to upgrade it to 64K and two 5-1/4" 160KB drives. Well, then came the 300 baud modem and finding the local BBS. Oh yeah baby, I'm on line before I can drive! That's it... I'm hooked... it's my drug, and a strong one at that. 

After a couple of years I sold it and bought a TRS-80 Model 4, with CPM and DOS. That did not last too long before I began working at a local computer store and purchased an ITT PC. Hey, 640K, two Double-Density disk drives and a color screen and a 1200 baud modem. Man that was a cool computer and it got me through community college. Then I entered the mainstream 40-hour work force working in a warehouse, moved out, and left the computer at home. I did not touch it much or another computer for a couple of years except to help out my mother, who to this very day still can't go six months without having some sort of catastrophe.

I injured my knees at my job, which required me to take a couple months to rehabilitate, and while recovering I decided to go back to college to take drafting and CAD. Well, I would of course need a new PC so I can do AutoCAD. That when I got the 486DX-66 with a 17" monitor (which I still have today on my Win-98 machine). Man alive... powerful and the fastest thing around... for about 6 months and a  newer computer hit the market. Oh well, but the bug had hit me again. The graphics were awesome, the BBSs got better, and besides the games were cool too, but I still wanted more.

I got a job doing CAD drafting and quit my warehouse job (after two months returning from rehab), After a few years, it was time to get a Pentium. I bought a Pentium 120 "computer shop special" that lasted about a year before I punched it up to a 150 and got a better modem (14400 baud). Then at work we got a network so we could share and store the CAD files. Hmmm. This "network" thing looked pretty cool. We soon got Doom and that was it. We never left for lunch. Just Doom sessions during lunch and after work. Wow, a LAN party. This is soooo cool. And the internet... what, need I say more?

I soon found the P-150 a bit lacking, so I went out with my future brother-in-law, bought and built a Pentium-II 350MHz  in early 1998 much to the chagrin of my fiancé.  Just my luck, the internet is getting better and I got a cable modem, woo-hoo! That was cool. Now I could IM my sister and future brother-in-law in San Diego from Sacramento while surfing the web. I had two computers now and wanted to hook them together to play, but the little woman wasn't into computers (yet) and did not want cables all over the place. OK, so no home LAN... at least not yet, but I did finally get the wife (by now) to get onto the net and begin surfing.

Left that job for another company. This new company has a better IT staff and I new that I needed to get in with them. They had all the toys. Well, after a while I moved into a new home,  bought a new P-4 2.0GHz, got DSL and a website. Life is good, right? Not yet. I still have this second computer that my wife hates sitting in the spare bedroom. "What good is that thing for anyway. It's not even hooked to the internet" she says. "Hmmm. Your right dear, " says I, "it is no good if it is not hooked to the 'net." Telling my dilemma to my IT friends gets me a Proxim 802.11 wireless bridge. That's right, 802.11, not 11b, just 802.11. Pretty secure because NO ONE has this thing for about 50 miles, at least. Cool baby. I just used the wizard in XP Home, created a home network, and poof, Internet upstairs and down stairs. Now this is convenient. We can both surf at the same time or she can use the downstairs computer when taking care of our son during the day.

But that wouldn't be enough. We wanted to get a PVR device and it was between Tivo and ReplayTV. Doing my research on the web and especially on the AVS Forum, we decided that we needed the Replay due to the simplicity of the integrated Ethernet port and the fact that they can share shows when networked. Ok, so we only bought one, but DVArchive, from SourceForge.net,  would allow me to save shows and store them off the Replay! Now, more than ever, I needed a network, but wait! We loved the ReplayTV so much that we bought another one for the bedroom. My wife loves the convenience of watching a show in the living room that was recorded in the bedroom and the recording conflict management available with networked ReplayTVs. So now I start getting bugged by the wife about when will  the network be hooked up and running.

Green light baby! So it's off to Fry's for a spending spree!! Well, not really, I do have to keep it realistic. I have been researching this for a few months and been asking the IT guys at work for their opinions and ideas about what would be the best equipment that I can get for my budget. I had figured for about $250  I could purchase what I needed along and with some donated parts, borrowed tools, and stuff I had on hand to properly wire the house.  I already had about 300' of Cat5e cable, was given a partial box of Cat5e cable (about300'), and borrowed a wire pull.  Since I have seven rooms that I want to  wire and not a whole lot of money to do it with. I found several sites that helped me figure out how to do the layout and planning of the routing and materials for the project. I decided that, because the ReplayTVs stream better between each other over a hardwire system, that I would run cable through out the house, at least where practical. I had planed on getting a laptop some time in the foreseeable future, so I decide that the system need to be wireless too.

Now, to just bring it all together...

The Plan