In the beginning...

I was hatched into this world just before the computer got personal.  I remember the first computer I ever used (as do most of us) in the mid 80's.  It was a Commodore 64 complete with a tape drive and a color monitor.  My sisters and I had hours of fun playing games on there.  Eventually we upgraded to a 5.25" floppy drive.
Then tragedy hit in the form of lightning.  It was replaced by a newer Commodore 128.  It keeps getting better!

Over the years I have had many tech devices, and worked on 10 times more for friends and family.  Countless hours playing Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe,  Using DOS on an IBM XT with TWO hard drives, one was 20 MB the other was 40 MB.  NO MORE FLOPPYS TO BOOT!  From there I moved to a Gateway 2000 486 running Windows 3.1 as I started college.  I upgraded it to a Pentium, installed Windows 95 and added an ethernet card to get high speed internet.

I remember working on computers from my neighbors in the dorms.  I quickly realized the difference between computer manufacturers based on what hardware would and would not work with some devices.  Many of my friends thought I should go into computers rather than mechanical engineering because I was good at it.  But, I never did.  I may be good at fixing computers, but I do not want to do it every day of the week for a job.

In college I also got a lot of Linux experience as all of the computers around campus were Sun Microsations running UNIX.  I was constantly trying to learn how to do new things (some of questionalbe legality) on these systems.

I soon upgraded to a Pentium II 333 unit with Windows 98.  This thing was screaming, but it had hardware issues between the Motherboard, video card and memory.  After 3 or 4 trips to the Gateway service center it was finally replaced with a brand new unit.  I sold the new PII333 to my sister as her aging 386 was not cutting it.  My new computer was a Pentium II 450.  I also bought a Toshiba Laptop that had a Pentium II 266 processor and a whopping 32 MB of RAM to use around campus. 

Windows 2000 came out and I had to check it out.  It was pretty good, but my P II 450 had a graphics card that did not like gaming in Windows 2000 since it was based on NT.  I set up so I could dual boot Windows 2000 and Windows 98.  Windows 2000 was stable and would run for 4-5 days without needing a reboot.  Windows 98 need a reboot at least once per day!

I nursed these computers for a while.  In 2005 a friend donated some computer parts to me and I built my first computer, an AMD Athlon 2.2 GHz machine.  Ran great, still runs great to this day.

I have also had two 17" Sony VAIO computers (both of which were replaced under warranty) and the 2nd one ended up getting me a 15" MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo from Best Buy for free.

I fell in love with the Mac OS.  It was simple, yet fully customizable.  I liked it so much, I tried installing OS X on my Dell D610 laptop that I had for work (used a second hard drive).  I learned a lot about drivers and hardware through that experience.  I had a triple boot on my D610 for Windows XP, OS X and Ubuntu.  Most of my techy friends would pretty much have a nerd-gasm on the spot when I showed it to them.

Then came the decision to build a Media Center PC.  I put one together for about $1000 and installed Windows Vista on it (UGH!).  Had a blast building it.  It has been rock solid except for the budget video card that blew half of its capacitors.   I upgraded the video card, and recently the CPU.  This computer can run with the best of them.  I started running Windows 7 on one of the first Beta builds.  It was 10x better than Vista ever could be.

My current computers that I still have (and that still work):
Toshiba Satellite (Pentium II 266 GHz, 96 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, Win 2k)
1st Build (AMD Pentium 2.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, Win 7)
MacBook Pro (Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, OS X Lion)
2nd Build (AMD Athlon X4 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 6 TB HDD, Win 7)
Work Laptop (Core2Duo 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, Win 8 Consumer Preview)

Well, that should tell you about my beginnings.  I will expand on this and continue.  Stay tuned if you want to read more about it!