Me and my wife watch laser discs, and I collect old computers. And one of my regular models is a 1993 computer with Windows 98 on it. I just love old technology, and I don't know what you would call that. I'm just stuck in 1991, '92.
When I was in college, I could only write on a WordPerfect program.
I'm a big fan of technology; I've been a geek since 1986... and I was spending all my paper money on gadgets.
Windows 95 had its 20th anniversary last year, so we got our hands on an old system and showed it to teenagers who were not even alive in 1995. The results were pretty great and also makes you feel quite old.
The reason I'm an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn't wait for the Powerbook.
Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.
I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.
I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.
While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.
Right at the start, when I was about 13 or 14, I only had an Amiga 500 Plus running a bit of tracker software called OctaMED. My brother was big into his computers, and when he moved up to a proper PC, I took charge of the Amiga.
Compunet was fantastic. You could upload these little demos of what you'd been working on, and it was a really nice social scene - years before the Internet.
One of the coolest days of my life was when I bought a 16K memory card upgrade and stuck it in my Apple II. I was kind of a geek.
The IIc was Apple's first crack at a 'portable' computer, which it sort of was if you didn't mind a 7.5 pound weight, plus monitor, external floppy drive, and all the cables.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. I got it as a present from my mom when I was eight years old, and all I wanted to do with that computer was play games.
I remember watching my dad work on PCs, and I remember using Texas Instrument calculators in school. It was a bit nostalgic.
I write early in the morning at the computer, and people think I'm crazy, but I still use my Mac-Classic even though we have a state-of-the-art PC. There are just less distractions with the simpler machine.
Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack.
I started on an Apple II, which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4,500 a year, and I spent half of it on the computer.
I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.
The job was to put into a, a computer with only 4K of memory an entire basic full blown, floating point Basic and that's one of the greatest programming feats I've ever had a chance to work on.
My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.
I am amused when somebody tries to illustrate the first email using a modern keyboard and a finger reaching for the '2' key. Wrong key! The @ was on the 'P' key.
