I've been taking hardware apart to see how it works since I was a kid, and fixing it came right along with that. The two have never really come apart from each other.

The timeline below is the short, honest version: a battery hack on a Game Boy, a move across the country, a first paying customer with a chewed-up charger cord, and a long stretch of learning on my own equipment before any of it was a business.

Where the name comes from

“Eternals” comes from never letting a machine stay dead. My IBM NetVista 6269-D2U broke down so many times that most people would have written it off long ago. I got it working again every time, whatever it took, and I still have it to this day. That's the idea behind the name: tech keeps going because someone refuses to give up on it.

Why there are two divisions

The work has always been two kinds of work. There's the infrastructure side — servers, networks, and the systems other people's businesses depend on staying up. And there's the bench side — a soldering iron, a dead board, and the question of whether it can be brought back instead of thrown away.

They need different tools, different pricing, and different conversations, so they run as two divisions under one parent company. EITG Networks handles hosting and network infrastructure. EternalTechRepairs (opening soon) handles the hardware. It's the same person behind both, so neither one hands you off to a department that doesn't exist.

How it works in practice

Small enough that you talk to the person doing the work. Everything gets documented, because the version of this that only lives in one person's head isn't a service — it's a liability.