Twenty Two years ago in 1997 I started Firey Computers in San Angelo, TX while I was attending Angelo State University. I made a garage apartment my office / computer repair shop and I looked up to people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. I wanted to be like them some day. They had started out in their garage so why couldn’t I?
I grew up in rural Oklahoma about 20 miles west of Tulsa. Even though I was a country boy I had always loved technology. In the mid 1980’s I won a contest on KXOJ (a Tulsa Christian radio station) for a free PC Bible game and I was so excited. The only problem was that we didn’t own a computer. I never got to use that game!
I attended a private Christian School, Bethany Christian Academy, west of Sand Springs when we first started seeing computers in the school. I was so excited to be able to play on the computers. I never dreamed I would one day be providing on-site computer repair in Tulsa. I remember we had two Commodore 64’s and one IBM DOS pc.
I would do my schoolwork as quickly as possible and do anything I could to earn the privilege to play on the computers. One day I learned that Homeland grocery store was offering a MAC computer to any school that could gather a certain dollar amount of receipts. I knew that our little private school wasn’t big enough to gather the amount needed just by our parents purchases so I convinced my parents to drop me off at Homeland on Saturdays and I stood outside for hours asking for receipts from people leaving the store. Eventually someone got mad because I was probably stealing receipts from Sand Springs Public schools so I was told to back off my solicitation. I don’t know that I slowed down even a little and who would be mean to a cute little middle schooler? With my help and the efforts of our other Bethany students and parents, we earned that MAC. I was so excited. I remember playing Oregon Trail, Carmen San Diego, and some castle game every chance I got. I know all too well the pain of dying of dysentery.
When I was in High School in Sand Springs and Sapulpa in the early 1990’s I started to work with my uncle Ray at Firey Brothers Music in Tulsa. His wife, Diana, was working with Apple computers at the time and I was able to get an Apple IIe from her. It was my first personal computer and it was all mine! I can still remember the sound of it reading those huge floppy disks.
My family moved to San Angelo, TX in the early 1990’s and I graduated high school at Angelo Christian School. In 1994 I enrolled at Angelo State University in the Computer Science program. When I started classes I was in heaven. They had computer labs! This was the early days when Netscape was our browser and chat rooms were the biggest thing we did. I remember how I had to carry the ICQ chat program on a 3.5 inch floppy and chatted with people all over the world. Buying on the internet was very new but I remember making my first Amazon purchase for a book. I also got approved credit just so I could buy my first Windows computer. I bought an NEC Laptop with Windows 95, a 486 processor, and a fax modem so I could connect to the internet. I was the dork who took my laptop to classes and made notes on it instead of paper. This was an awesome time. I remember going to a web page and watching it download an image and draw it left to right across the screen one line at a time. It took 5-10 minutes to see one full screen image!
While I was in college in San Angelo, TX I got a part time job at Power Systems Computers, owned by Michael Strain, who is still in business today. I was probably one of the more annoying employees he had because I had a hard time staying in my job description. I was hired to do returns and other gopher type jobs due to my inexperience, but every chance I got I was out front looking at the computers on display or talking to the techs in the repair room trying to learn as much as I could about fixing computers. I finally decided to take the leap and quit my job and opened Firey Computers.
I was a little crazy. I didn’t really know how to fix computers yet but that didn’t stop me. I bought a book on how to upgrade computers and bought an ad in the phonebook. I learned as I went and spoke to other people or did research when I got stuck. Somehow, I’ve managed to hold onto that book all these years.
In 2000, I moved back to Tulsa and opened my first computer repair shop Tulsa out of a room I rented from my Uncle Ray Firey at his Firey Brothers Music location on 11th street (now at 4th and Sheridan) in Tulsa, OK. These were still the heady days of expensive computers, Napster, the Pirate Bay, and the budding internet as we now know it. I placed ads on KXOJ and began selling computers, running network cabling, and of course doing computer repairs in Tulsa and surrounding areas. It was during this time I changed the company name from Firey Computers to Fireytech to allow us to be more flexible in the rapidly changing tech world.
I decided it was time to venture out on my own so in 2001 I opened up a computer repair store front in Broken Arrow, OK. I worked out of Broken Arrow for a number of years until I moved back to Sand Springs so I moved my computer repair business to Tulsa to be closer to home.
Now, 22 years later, I look back on the history of Fireytech, the best on-site computer repair business in Tulsa, and I realize how crazy it must have looked from the outside looking in. It has been filled with ups and downs, successes and failures, and a lot of learning about business and even more learning and growing of myself. I look to Jesus as my strength and I pray that all the lessons I have learned over the past few years will help me to make Fireytech an even greater success in the future.
If you need a computer repair, feel free to call Fireytech on-site computer repair Tulsa and we will provide you with excellent service in your home or business. Thank you for your time!