About the Owner

Background

Hello! My name is John Ledden, and I am the owner of Symba Systems. I have been working with computers since 1982 and have closely followed the developing technology through the years. From the time I got my very first computer (a Timex-Sinclair 1000 hooked up to a Zenith black-and-white portable TV) I knew that I wanted a career in the computer industry. Although I mostly experimented with computers for my own personal use, I began to help others with problems with increasing frequency. Through several career changes, I cultivated my interest in computers and in 1995 decided to make it a full time business. Thus Symba Systems was born.

Experience

The majority of my knowledge of computers has been attained by personal experience and trial-and-error. While I have had some formal training in the field, my college degree is in Business Administration. I have been exposed to many types and variations of computers over the years, and have watched the tremendous industry growth and innovation.

For those of you who are interested in a little nostalgia, I'll share with you my journey through the personal computer world. After my Timex-Sinclair 1000 I got a Commodore VIC-20 complete with a portable color TV for a monitor and cassette player to store programs. Next came an IBM XT clone with two 5.25" floppy drives (no hard drive) and 640k of RAM (it didn't even come with an operating system!) I upgraded that system several times, going to a 286 then a 386, adding a hard drive (my first hard drive was a Seagate 30 mb that I paid $319 for!) and more memory. Everything up to the 286 was DOS-based, command line driven software. The advent of Windows was a huge step into the realm of multitasking, and I hesitated at first. It was such a departure from what I was used to. The 386 also brought a CGA color monitor (much better than the old amber monochrome I had been using.)

The next computer was a Tandy 486 with Windows 3.1, a 200 mb hard drive and 4 megs of RAM. I also got a new VGA monitor and was amazed at the difference. The clarity and colors were overwhelming! Since then it has been a rapid succession of Pentium 60, a NexGen 90, Cyrix 133 and 166, and AMD K6 200 and 233, and an AMD Athlon 1800+. My current personal machine is an Intel Pentium D 3.0 Ghz with 1 gb RAM, 250 gb hard drive, 256 mb PCIx video, 22" widescreen LCD monitor, DVD-RW drive, DVD drive, SoundBlaster Live! 128 sound card with Boston Acoustics MicroMedia 3-piece speaker system, Canon laser printer/scanner/copier, and an HP color Laserjet printer. Quite a far cry from that first computer with the membrane keyboard I had, but it IS getting about time for me to upgrade again!