We got our first “home computer” when I was 3 – an Atari 2600. Cbumette Drives and cartridges. My father used to program in games out of the Analog magazine for me. I still have that Atari, and the 2400baud modem for it, somewhere. Sadly, I imagine the cbumettes are long past usable.

Our first “PC” came when I was 6 (1986). An IBM. Blazing fast 286 DX 33mhz (Yes, kids, thirty-three whopping megahertz). It had a whole megabyte of RAM, and a 30 meg mother****ing harddrive. Jesus Christ, who the hell would need 30 megs of storage space?! PLUS there was the 5.25” drive and the awesome newfangled 3.5” “floppy” drive. DD was just gaining popularity, and, man, you could put more than a megabyte of info on a single disk. Talk about portable storage!

Ironically, that computer could boot up in 30 seconds, and I’d be working in my WordPerfect 10 seconds after I saw a command line. Nowadays, I turn on my tired old Lenovo and go make a cup of friggin’ coffee while I wait. Thanks, Microsoft.

I also remember beta-testing Win95, and hating it. 3.1 and 3.11 were OK, riding on DOS, but what the hell? What good was a GUI with no way to shut off all the bells and whistles and go back to a nice clean command line?