My first computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. We picked it up at a garage sale for $35. I used an old 12 inch black and white Sony TV as a monitor. The TV came out of my grandparents Airstream trailer. They decided they wanted a color TV on the road with them in their travels.

My parents bought me an Apple //gs in 1986. We got it just before Christmas. That computer served me until I graduated from high school in 1993.

At that time I bought a Macintosh Portable. It was a semi-laptop. I say semi as it weighed 15 pounds-mostly due to a motorcycle type battery. My Mac served me for three and a half years before the screen failed in late 1996. The cost of repairing it was not worthwhile.

In March of 1997, I purchased an HP Pavillion. It was Pentium based and came with Windows 95. I used this computer until 2001 when my brother in law bought a new computer and I wound up with his old one. My wife used my old HP for a few years until she inherited a computer from her sister who had bought a laptop.

My second IBM-compatible computer was a hand me down homebrew Pentium III running at 550MHz. It saw some upgrades and served me for about seven years until I bought a laptop in mid 2007.

I finally went portable in 2007 with the purchase of a Compaq Presario V6000 laptop. Its AMD Sempron processor chugs away at 1.8 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM.