Age

OK, me to... Born in 1967. My first computer was...hmmm...a Trash 80 Model I at the local Radio Shack. This was quickly followed by the Commodore PETs in the school's computer lab (which I quickly, er, borrowed the key for and made a copy of). Got to know the janitors and spent lots of evenings there. I then received a Commodore VIC-20 as a gift, which was my main machine until I graduated high school, which would have been 1985. I bought a complete Fat Mac system (astonishingly, I spent somewhere around $5,000 for a complete system. $500 for a 1200-baud modem...eh gads.) I would have stuck with a Mac except no one in B-school used them. My dad brought home a PS/2 Model 50 from work which I used until I built my own. I started collecting machines in about 1992 when I got that very same PET I used at the middle school that I went to and from which I copied the computer lab key. It was the same math teacher running the lab, too, 10 years later. After that, I stuck with micros (mostly 6502-based Commodores and Apples) until I got a PDP11, which I played with for a few years and then donated to the RICM. Here and there, I picked up some Trash 80 stuff (Model 100), some SBCs (KIM and AIM primarily), and a Northstar Horizon, plus some random machines (ZX-81, Atari Portfolio). Lately, I seem to be collecting mostly printed documentation. I have a nearly complete set of BYTE magazines (from the interesting years). From 1975 to 1986 (135 issues), I'm missing only 13 issues (most of 1976). I have a database of about 700 "interesting" article entries that someday I hope to have posted to my Web site. Rich