I first came into contact with this sort of technology when I was about five years old or so, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, when my grandfather somehow acquired a PONG machine.

I was quite intrigued, but this was just a toy. But I liked it, so I eventually got hold of an Atari 2600. Now, if I recall correctly, it was all Nolen Bushnell at this point (PONG as well as Atari), which means I have him to blame for some of this. I always thought Chuck E Cheese sorta sucked. But I digress.

My first actual exposure to a computer, and the thing I learned to program in BASIC on, was in fact an Atari 800 computer. Damn. It was a real computer, I suppose, with upgradable memory and two cartridge slots that went unused for as long as I was there. It seems that my elementary school, Horizon in Glendale, Arizona, wanted to become technological and purchased a few of these things and a couple of Atari 400 machines, without bothering to get anyone training on them.

At the time, I was busy taking a "Science Lab" course with 7th grade students... so I was the only 3rd grader in there. Wow. So of course, They (whomever They are) assumed that I would be more than happy to pick up what I could on these new fangled doodads. They even had me work with a knock-out (read that as "pretty and early-bloomer") named Debbie who knew extremely little about computers (but something about pom poms and cheerleading).

So I was basically left to my own devices, and the assistance of two other males who were a few years older than I was at the time. I think one was called Doug, and I can't remember the other one, but they were both tremendously annoying. I had not quite realized it yet, but retrospectively, I was in the nerd closet...

I don't want to spend too much time on this part, but I guess since it was my first time and all, it is worthy. I learned to program in Atari BASIC and saved everything on this little priceless treasure-- the 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. I had one, given to me by the science teacher, Mr. Bartholemew, and I seem to recall it standing up to all the mistreatment a nerdy 3rd grader could toss at it. On it were all the programs I muddled through and got working on that silly 800. Long gone is it now.

Well, enough about that, because eventually I started going to a "Real" school that had a real programming curriculum. Not really, but they did have a whole room full of PET computers, courtesy of Commodore. The teacher, Mrs. Beatty, doubled as a math teacher, and she was actually pretty cool. Eventually (the year later... it was Royal Palm Junior High, by the way, and I was only there for the standard two years), the PETs were replaced with Acorn machines and separate, amber-phosphur monitors. In fact, those Acorn machines were even on some sort of network, and I remember instantly discovering how to send messages to other machines. What a nerd.

The real fun, though, was in the library, where I ended up spending all of my time as a TA. It was an Apple II+, which to me was a small diety with a keyboard. This was the thing that I spent a whole lot of time playing with, honing my BASIC programming skills and making DOS 3.3 do my bidding. I even managed to royally screw up one of my teacher's grades when I corrupted his grade files on his single diskette (no backups back then).

I was reflecting recently on this period, before I had a computer of my own, and I have realized that I was a total computer slut. I used to hang around with this guy named Tom Wilson who also had an Apple II+ just so that I could play with that machine. I loved it. I even liked to play games back then, like Wizardry, and I had Locksmith and a pirated copy of FlightSim and all that. I would go to computer stores and look at all the new models, always having my eye on an Apple machine. One of our neighbors, Harriet Putman, was a school teacher and actually borrowed a computer from her school over one summer so I would have a machine at my disposal.

Well, eventually, I graduated from Junior High (yippee... a major achievement) and went on to Sunnyslope High School, where they had an entire room full of Apple II+ machines for the business class thing in the vocational department. In other words, no "real" use for them, and yet, no access for me. Luckily, my parents provided me with one better... an Apple //e of my very own (to share with my sister). Now I was cooking with gas.

I learned 6502 assembly, and since all the begging in the world didn't get me a modem, I saved and saved for my $300 Mitsuba 1200, which was so much cheaper once the Hayes 2400 made 1200 a thing of the past. We had a C.Itoh parallel printer, dual disk drives, and and a digital RGB monitor with a tiltable screen (back when Apple was dealing the cool stuff). I joined the ADAM II club (The Arizona Desert Apple Menagerie II, later renamed the Arizona Apple Users Group, later renamed the Arizona Macintosh Users Group), and got all sorts of good tips on upcoming stuff. The president of Checkmate Technology was there and convinced us to buy his 1 Megabyte RAM card for the //e extended slot, which I did. I also had an AE TransWarp card that ran at a blitering 3.6 Megahertz!

Whew. I guess I was going a little nutty there. Sorry.

So I made the most of that Apple, and I actually purchased WordPerfect (not sure who owned it back then) and made it all load into my Checkmate card so it was usable. Oh, how many papers were tapped into that thing, for myself and others. I used it once to recover some short stories written by my sophomore english classmate, Jonathan Bond (seen in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure as the lifeguard at waterworld who throws Napoleon in, I believe), and I even used it to do some of that not-so-legal stuff (which I won't go in to here, of course, but it involved a modem).

We borrowed a Macintosh during some weird intro promotion where you could just go sign one out for a week or so. I was bowled over by MacPaint and MacWrite, as everyone else was, and I was at that moment completely disappointed with the Apple //e. Mostly. It still worked to call BBSs and all that, but its days as my favorite machine were over.

Well, to end a story that is still going today, I got a Mac in college, I got really into the Mac, but I was using Winblows and Dynix (a multi-processor UNIX running on a Sequent Symmetry machine in our CS department), and even VMS. It turns out that I really enjoyed using UNIX, more than I realized at the time, because when I eventually found myself at Netscape, I fell into UNIX and never went back. I converted my PowerMac 7500 to a LinuxPPC box, I built my own PentiumPro box, and I even went nutty and got an Alpha 21164 machine (which is not running anything at the moment, thanks to my misconfigurations...). At this point, I like computers, I hate Microsoft, and I am happy that Apple is keeping PPC alive. I hate software patents, and I use fvwm2 day-to-day. And that is that.