The first computer I "touched" was ICE Felix HC85, a Sinclair Spectrum (Z80) Romanian clone, back in high school in the late 80's (which BTW I just acquired (with my wife's cousin help) as well as a HC90 for about $5/piece although I have not verified that they are in working condition due to lack of a proper power supply and a PAL signal converter to NTSC or VGA!). At that point my high school had two units with tape drives and monochrome screens. We used them to key in BASIC programs. We also learned FORTRAN, but we never ran the programs, because we couldn't, thus counting on our teacher and the computer geek to check our syntax and the validity of our code ;-)

In 1990, when I moved to the US, I wanted to have my own computer, so my dad approved and bought me an IBM PS/1 286/10MHz (2011/E34), 12" VGA (256 colors), 30MB HD, 1MB RAM, 2400 baud Hayes-compatible internal modem which ran at the time it came out (8/90) for about $2500-$3000 (if you add the HP Deskjet printer and some software, an expansion slot unit that I sold later to some guy in Sweden, and a 5 1/4" floppy drive). I used to call many Chicago area BBSes. For a while I even had a Prodigy account. Recently, nine years later, I found an exact working model at a thrift store for only $20!

Summer of 1990, I went to Illinois Institute of Technology for a Summer Science Program for HS students. There I learned about kermit and a little about timeshare computing (IBM mainframe running MVS). I loved it. I went back the following summer. Meanwhile, back in high school, I learned COBOL.

Summer 1992 I enrolled at University of Illinois at Chicago campus where I got my first email account and made first contact with IBM's CMS (UICVM CMS was retired in 1999) on more mainframes and Pascal while learning data structures.

Fall 1993, I transfered to the Urbana/Champaign campus, where I learned about several UNIX flavors- Sun's SunOS/Solaris, IBM's AIX, NeXT's NeXTStep, DEC's OSF/1 and other OSes (i.e. DEC's VMS), programming (MIPS assembler, C++), more Macintoshes (first Mac I used I think it was one that our high school had for educational software), etc.

In 1994, I put together from parts my own AMD 386/40Mhz with 4MB RAM (at $40 a meg), a 14" VGA monitor (about $200), and a 120MB HD. I ran MS Windows 3.1 and a crippled Linux (I never got the mouse to work, although X Windows ran without it fine ;-). At the same time I had a Tandy 1000 (mono,8088@4.77Mhz,no HD,2x 5 1/4" FD) with a 300 baud modem which I used to read email off the university UNIX machines whenever I had a lot of time to waste. I got that baby for about $100.

May 1995: I graduated and I started working for AT&T in Columbus, Ohio, that same month (where I lasted exactly five years). For a few years I used a Sun SPARCstation 5 as my desktop/development machine. When I got hired, I bought an AT&T Globalyst 375 TPC (NCR-made; support)- an Intel Pentium 100Mhz system which died and was resurected by Adrian P. who figured out that the BIOS was toast and replaced it. [I also bought a 17" monitor for about $400 which I kept until summer 2001 when I got rid of it for about $50 in order to replace it with a $400 15" LCD unit.] That was my machine until its death after which I brought home my work HP Vectra/P200 which was retired in favor of an HP Kayak/dual PII300, sometime in the fall of '98.

Late 1999, my wife bought me an Intel Celeron 400Mhz/64MB RAM for XMas which runs Linux-Mandrake 6.0 and Win98 SE right now and is in the possesion of my wife's cousin somewhere in Mizil, Prahova, Romania since spring 2001. We had Roadrunner starting sometime in '99 until May'00 when we moved out of Columbus. Until AT&T rolled it out where we live (sometime at the end of 2000) we had Earthlink and @inr.net. XMas 2000, I got an AMD Duron 800Mhz/256MB RAM barebones for under $500 from 499pc.com (the PC went dead after I clipped off an annoying fan! Update: it turns out it was the power supply again). I then had to browse the net off my P100 system, and sometimes even off my IBM PS/2E (model 9533; i486/33MHz)!

Fall 2001, I got from ebay a cheap ($150) IBM Thinkpad 760XL (Type 2647/P166/106MB/2.1GB) laptop recently on which I installed the same Linux Mandrake 6.0 distro (with 2.2.9 kernel, most of the GNU packages in the distro and both KDE 1.1.1 and gnome 1.0.4) and which I plan to hook to my LAN as soon as I figure out how to config the PCMCIA NIC... I had quite some fun with my wife's iMac when we installed Mac OS X and configured it to work with our LAN. I got quite a kick out of opening shell windows and screwing around with its config from the command line! Darwin rules!
I finally caved in and got my first new laptop this Xmas 2001, a Compaq Presario 700US, AMD Duron 900Mhz, 256M RAM, 20GB HD, 8x DVD, 14" TFT, Ethernet/56K modem, Windows XP for under $800... It was a breeze setting it up and adding it to the LAN. Browsing on this little puppy beats any day browsing on a P100/40MB RAM PC ;-)

My first console game was a Pong clone that my dad brought home from France (or some other place) in the mid 80's. We played that on our TV to death. As a kid I used to spend a lot of my pocket change on arcade games whenever I had any. Galaga and another game I can't remember the name (Phoenix, Space Invaders or a clone probably) were my favorites. Now I own a few Atari consoles and a Galaga cartridge that I use every once in a while for fun. I suck at the game (I complete only about 80+ levels in novice mode ;-) but I still enjoy it. My favorite arcade game of all time is Tetris, which I first played in '90 on some old Tandy 1000s during recess in high school. My best was about 107 levels and 9000+ points on those slugs. I sometimes play it still on my Tandy (altough I haven't turned on the beast since '97). My last game playing frenzy was minesweeper (boooo...the crowds jeer at the remote connection with the nasty cyclop µHard). I'm not fast, but I got pretty far in max mode (200 mines at max size of 30x24): 11 mines left to uncover when I blew up (note: my wife got as far as 10 mines).

My newest toy is a Cybiko Classic ($100) which can be programmed in BASIC and LOGO. It's a 32-bit handheld with a Hitachi 11Mhz CPU a 4-gray scale 160x100 LCD screen. I added to it the 1MB mem expansion and the free MP3 player. I recently got another classic from ebay for about $25 (w/o the extra memory or the MP3 player). It doesn't even come close to Compaq's iPaq Pocket PC, but it's definitely fun and cheap! I must say that the H3150 (grayscale) selling for little more than $100 is very tempting!

Feb 9, 2003: In August 2002, with Adrian D.'s help, I figured out that my AMD800 XMas 2000 PC had only a power supply failure (for a second time). I bought a reliable power supply this time from a recommended supplier: PC Power and Cooling. Since my wife's iBook ill-fated yoyo power supply short-circuited the mobo, I ended up buying her a new iBook from Mac Pro Systems for $666. I also got a Cybiko Extreme off ebay for about $30-40 which seems to be a dud (it does not even turn on) even though it looks brand new. I might open it up someday just to see its guts... I had better luck with a Sega Dreamcast system I got off ebay last year. It came with the Atari Anniversary Edition game CD which includes a 12 Atari classics and some neat video interviews with the original game designers and more. I love it! And to think that I wanted to put Linux on it... And speaking of Linux I just put RedHat7.2 on a Digital HiNote VP700 (200Mhz/148MB RAM) laptop I got from surplus for under $100.
Just a few weeks ago I found a Nintendo Power Glove at the local thrift store. Maybe one day I'll try it out on one of my NES consoles... We also found a good Mac Powerbook 165 (68030/33Mhz/4MB RAM/80MB HD/640x400 16-grayscale) for under $20 at the thrift store. It was loaded with Microsoft Word 5.1, MacSLIP, Eudora. I also got a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 (AMD DX4/100Mhz, 8MB RAM) tablet PC for playing. Linux will go there too someday...
Mar 31, 2003: More trouble in paradise. My Presario 700US laptop's internal power converter is kaput, the battery is drained and there seems to be no external chargers for this type of battery. So, I figured at least I'll pull the HD out (20GB) and attach it to another PC until I figure something out. So, I had nothing better to do and tried to hook the HD up into an USB2 device. The problems started when I hooked it to my AMD800 system and tried to load the drivers from the CD that came with the USB2 adapter. It managed to hose my BIOS so nicely, that even after resetting the CMOS, my PC will not recognize KB or mouse. So I'll probably have to flash the BIOS somehow. Until I get around to that, I bought this: 
AMD 1400+ CPU (950Mhz/200Mhz FSB/128KB L1/64KB L2 cache/Socket A/1.6V/40W)
BAREBONE SYSTEM
SOCKET A VIA-KM266 CHIPSET 
PC133 OR PC2100 DDR
MB-810CLM AMPTRON
1.44 DRIVE - VIDEO
VIDEO ON BOARD 3D W/4X AGP 
32 BIT PCI SOUND ON BOARD
56KBPS FAX/MODEM V.90
10/100 LAN ON BOARD
APPROVED 300 W POWER SUPPLY
AMD APPROVED ATX MID TOWER 
CASE WITH 300W PS UL/2ND FAN
AMD 1400+ CPU
ONLY $159.00
SKU 50050             WITH  1400+ CPU
and a 256MB PC133 module ($55) from Showtime PC (where I also got the virulent USB2 device). Well, I pulled the HDs from the AMD800 PC and plugged them in the new PC, and the NIC too (cause the onboard NIC isn't working yet), and I got the new PC running and hooked to my LAN. While the new PC is being used by our tenant and my laptop is dead, I'm crusing the web off my AT&T Globalyst 375TPC which was recommissioned for this momentous occasion ;-)
Apr 27, 2003: Well, MZ's HP Omnibook 5700 laptop screen came unhinged last week and all you can see is a white screen now (some wire must have come loose), so I gave her the Globalyst and for now I'm sharing with my wife her iBook ;-) I tried to get the Wireless LAN card working on the PS2/E, but it didn't take (maybe because it has Win95?). As to my dead AMD800 mobo, I'm thinking that the USB device might have screwed up hardware (not just the BIOS), when I tried to draw power for it through the PS/2 ports... A week or so ago, I played with two alpha systems I got as surplus from work: The first has two 1GB SCSI hard drives and RH7.2 failed to install because of lack of space, although I managed to install Tru64 Unix without X on it by using an external SCSI 1x CD-ROM that I have laying around (since I got the PC without a CD-ROM). It also takes WinNT 3.5 or 4.0. I have 3.51 and I might just install that. I thought that the second PC had Linux on it, but it seems that I'm wrong, and I have not figured out yet how to get into the SRM to slap some OS on it. I'd like to try to put OpenVMS on one of these babies some day.
May 24, 2003: Today I resurected the old iBook by replacing the mobo ($139+sh on ebay). So I have a 300Mhz/96MB RAM/3GB HD clamshell iBook with MacOS9. I already hooked to the internet and updated from 9.0->9.0.4->9.1->9.2.1->9.2.2 (I'm actually writing this from the old iBook). Today also, I found at the city dump a Magnavox Odyssey 500 which doesn't work properly (once the ball crosses the right side of the screen no more balls are served), but it's an interesting PONG system nonetheless: each player has a knob for altering the ball spin as it's moving, one knob for moving back and forth and the usual knob for moving the player up and down. As it changes direction, the ball changes color to match the player which last touched it (one player is white and one is orange).
July 14, 2003: I wiped RH7.x off the Digital HiNote VP and installed NT4 on it. I still have to install the Xircom CWE1130 wireless card and figure out what graphics chip is on board so I can get more than 800x600/16 colors. The HP Omnibook 5700 CP's screen is busted, but it still works if hooked to a monitor.
July 17, 2003: The HiNote laptop most likely has a Chips & Technology 65548 SVGA 1MB video chip. According to Asilliant's support page, there is no NT4 driver for it. It might be worth trying an OEM driver such as Toshiba's NT4CT.EXE. I managed to install the NT4 driver for the wireless card, but it can't talk to the AP even though it can send packets. I saw mention of changing the IRQ for some laptops, but since there are no conflicts I doubt that will do the trick (I already tried IRQs 10 and 11).
July 21, 2003: I gave up on the NT4 install since there are no NT C&T drivers. I used their chip ID tool and I found that I actually have a C&T 65525/530 PCI graphics chip. Of course, now I found an NT driver for the 65525 here and more here. The two leads I had on Win95 drivers turned cold, but I did manage to get the Xircom wireless card to work. 800x600/16 colors and small screen sucks though!
Sept 6, 2003: I got a Toshiba Portege 3010CT a month ago on ebay for $239 total, which is my current PC from which I'm entering this now.
Jan 11, 2004: Back in Oct 2003, I also got a Toshiba 7020CT (366Mhz/192MB RAM/6GB HD $280 w/o sh) which is in use by MZ now, since the 3010CT I gave her freezes up at will. I replaced the HD on the 3010CT with a nice 2.5" 20GB I got at Showtime PC for $100, and I only managed to format the HD and install DOS on it so far. A few days ago I gave my RICOH MP6201PS 2x CDRW SCSI to a coworker since my AMD900 PC has an internal Sony 8x/4x/32x CDRW. Oh yeah, and the HiNote laptop connects just fine to the WAP now (upgrading to Win98 might have had something to do with it). The only problem is that the screen is not blown up (about 50% of LCD surface is unused). Back in Nov 2003 we also got an iBook 366MHz/64MB/10GB/Firewire 24xCDROM on ebay ($329 +29sh) which was missing a CD door, so we snatched it from Marina's iBook together with the Airport card (her old iBook is in storage waiting to be used as spare parts if need be). Around Xmas we installed Panther on her new baby. My iBook has only Jaguar at this point, although I'm thinking about adding Panther to it as well. For Xmas I also got a nice Samsung ML1710MP laser printer. It's not duplex, but so far it beats the inkjets by far in quality (and hopefully in maintenance costs).
Jan 18, 2004: Yesterday, I discovered that my AMD1400+ PC does not boot properly (no video signal, no beeps, but the drives light up, spin and read info). We bought a used PowerMac 7500/100 for $125 (incl. 20" SuperMac RGB monitor) upgraded with the NewerTech G3/450 daughterboard from some guy in Cambridge (who advertised it on Boston Craig's list). On the way back from Cambridge, we purchased an Orangelink+ USB2/Firewire PCI board from MacEdge for $80. The 260MB PCMCIA HD I got from a coworker is probably not good since my other 340MB PCMCIA HD I have works with my PCMCIA drive.
Jan 19, 2004: Before the AMD1400+ went kaput, I got a DWL-520 PCI 802.11b wireless card ($40 after $10 rebate) for it, so I don't have to run a wire from the living room to our bedroom, but it was not to be. I got a DWL-122 USB 802.11b stick ($40) for the 7500, but it requires Jaguar and Jaguar did not quite install properly on the 6GB ext SCSI drive (had to use XPostFacto since Jaguar does not like the 7500; the drive is partitioned in 3GB HFS+, 1.2GB Linux user, .8GB Linux home and rest unformatted): it completed the install, but it freezes on boot with some goofy striations running horizontally in the middle of the screen (could be a graphics card problem, or a NewerTech problem). So, I ran a wire from the living room to our bedroom, just so the 7500 gets a net connection.
Jun 9, 2007: Right now I'm using a MacBook 1GHz G4, 1/2Go RAM, 30Go HD, OS X 10.4.9 Tiger as my laptop (inherited from M when she got a newer MacBook A1181 IntelDuo Mac 1.8GHz 1G RAM in April). I also use a G4 733MHz 1/2Go RAM 36Go+120Go HD 10.4 tower (which also runs Virtual PC/Windows XP and I got from AP). I also got a new AMD2800+ PC last year especially for WC2006 which I was planning to use this with a HD capture card to record some soccer games, but I never managed to get configured properly. Guests to our house get to use an old G3/366MHz clamshell laptop that also used to be M's. My IBM Thinkpad just lost it's HD, so I recently got a 80Go HD 2.5" to replace it. Most of my old babies were left back in NH in storage when we moved to Canada (eg. Globalyst, Alpha PCs, PS/2E, IIc's, Atari's, C64/C128's).
Oct 18, 2008: The 1Ghz G4 died last night of a very common death amongst Apples: loud fan and black screen syndrome. Cause: unknown. Likely fatal flaw: logic board busted. Right now, I'm using my IBM Thinkpad on which I installed Ubuntu7.10/Gnome2.20/2.6.22-14Linux free distro a while back. Backtracking: the G3/366 went to my parents (and it died shortly after), then a G4 tower I got from Adrian P (together with my 15" LCD) went to my parents in the summer to replace the dead clamshell iBook and I bought a used G4/833Mhz from a guy in Etobicoke for under $300 after my previous G4 tower went dead as well in the spring. In place of the 15" LCD I got another Samsung, a SyncMaster 2053BW 20" LCD. I just realized that we lost 3 Apples this year (rip), but we still have two Apples running (the G4 tower and Marina's Duo) besides the old ones in storage.
Mar 15, 2009: Last night, I downloaded Ubuntu Server 8.04 server x64 ISO and burned it to CD from my G4 tower. This morning I installed it as a ext3 RAID-1 setup (2x 1TB Seagate ST31000333AS Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 115MB/s) AMDx64 2GB/RAM system I've had for almost 3 years and was never put to good use (see Jun 2007 entry). I had the 2x 1TB disks for a month or two now (CAD$128+tax each). I've enabled NFS and configured both our Duo/10.5/Leopard laptops to write to it using Directory Utility (backup included for free with RAID-1 mirrored disks :-). Sweet. Oh, and I installed all the server options on my Ubuntu server: LAMP, DNS, mail, file, Samba, etc. Maybe this machine will become our website(s) sandbox and I'll start migrating various services from our current domain provider (i.e. mail, DNS, web server for my lightly accessed domains). One day, I'll even set it up as a boot server and migrate the G4 to Ubuntu as well...10:27PM: I added my G4/Tiger as an NFS client also.
Mar 23, 2009: I switched the NFS server and all three NFS clients to static IP 'cause I don't have a name server and NFS wasn't working properly when my DCHP addresses got reshuffled.
July 11, 2010: After upgrading the Ubuntu server to 10.4 about a month ago, it stopped booting from the RAID. So far I've managed to boot it from the 8.4 CD and get shell access to the files. So it must be that the boot/grub section needs repair. Given that others have had similar problems with the upgrade related to the RAID setup, that's probably what confused the installer. I'm surprised that an upgrade can make a system inoperable given Ubuntu's fame and the effort put into it.
August 6, 2010: About a week or two ago, I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.32-22 as it was suggested by some re: 10.4/Lucid upgrade fsck-up. After that upgrade, on boot, the server gave me a halt screen so I gave up since it was late in the night. Tonight, I booted the server, it halted again, but after a few minutes it rebooted by itself and came up fine. Since NFSv3 was not supported in the new kernel, I had to upgrade to NFSv4, and so far so good. I can access the files on the server over NFS from my laptop :-) When I tried to shutdown the server, it prompted me to repair broken packages (udev). After it downloaded over 575 packages at a speed average of 500+KB/s, it still had 500MB+ to download. I think it's downloading the whole damn Lucid again!
August 22, 2010: Got a ASUS EEE PC 4G (512MB RAM, 4GB SSD, 7" XVGA, 2 USB ports, ext VGA port, 10/100Mbs Ethernet RJ45 port, Linux Xandros, 2lbs) at Factory Direct in Brampton for $180+3yr warranty($54)+tax. I added a few extra Deb packages (GNU C/C++ compilers, wine, gawk) to it. The initial battery charge lasted about 3 hours. It came pre-installed with OpenOffice, Firefox, PDF reader. Connecting it to my wireless home network was easy. The only complaint so far is that the touchpad button is very stiff and that adding more RAM might void the warranty or not be possible at all.
June 18-19, 2011: Dismantled the Ubuntu server, my taking the HDs out, putting them into my new DNS323 NAS and reformatting them. I first backed the data unto our LaCie external USB drive and restored after the NAS reformatted them as ext3 RAID 1. This should save some electricity and reduce noise polution.
Oct 4, 2012: This morning I remembered about one particular game I bought and played a lot in the early 90s on my PS/1: Wings of Fury. It came on both a 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2" disk if I recall and it's in my top 10 of all time along Phoenix (possibly the first arcade game I ever played in my hometown in the '80s in the lobby of a hotel?), Galaga, Tetris, Minesweeper and Space Quest IV.
Dec 4, 2015: Bought new Apple iPad Air9.7" retina 64GB Wifi (gold, MH182LL/A) for $620 on amazon.ca for Marina. I inherited her old iPad (9.7" non-retina).
Dec 28, 2015: Bought new Asus E402M laptop (14" LCD, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD) from BestBuy for C$622 for myself.
Nov 5, 2016: Acquired Monty Plays Scrabble (1983) electronic game for C$3.99 from Value Village. It has serial #23971 and both vocabulary modules for a total 44k word dictionary. It works and I played two games against it:
Dec 30, 2016: I rescued one of my old PCs from NH which I brought back to Canada: Atari 520ST (1985).
Spring 2017: Dual booted Asus E402M laptop by installing Linux Mint along Windows 10. This Linux distro is quite unstable as it freezes the OS quite often :-(
Apr 30, 2017: Our basement in NH was unceremoniously emptied by 1-800-GOT-JUNK in order to prep the condo for sale. All my old PCs got junked (including the IBM PS/1, old DECs, Sparcs, old Apples, Ataris, Commodores).
Aug 9, 2017: The Apple iMac5.1 (late 2006), 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo, 1GB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, 20" LCD (1680x1050) arrived via FedEx. I installed OSX 10.6.8 on it.
Nov 21, 2018: The DNS-323 (disc support 2013) power supply kicked the bucket, the replacement was DOA, so I ordered a used Synology DS214 (with 2x1TB HDD) off ebay. I got it up and running with very little effort. PS: Linux Mint on my Asus E402M laptop stopped freezing after some kernel upgrade a while back.
Nov 26, 2018: Bought a 2nd Monty Plays Scrabble on ebay for US$17.68. It does not have the expansion vocab modules.
July 7, 2019: The Ubuntu/Mint 18.1 partition on my Asus E402M laptop is messed up and it won't boot (it has been giving me bad sectors for more than 1 month now). I had to change the default partition back to Windows until I fix the Mint partition :-(
Apr 4-12, 2021: I bought and received a C64 Phoenix cartridge for C$11 from someon in AB (thru ebay).
May-June, 2022: I started using the laptop I bought myself for xmas: HP-17cn0008ca (40x26x2cm, 2Kg, 65W, 41Wh Li-ion battery): Intel i5-1135G7 900MHz to 2.4Ghz base (up to 4.2Ghz TurboBoost, 8MB L3 cache, 4 cores/8 threads, 10nm SupeFin, 4 GT/s bus, 12W to 28W; Intel Iris XE Graphics/1.3GHz/4096x2304@60Hz/DirectX12.1/OpenGL4.6/OpenCL3.0/80execUnits), 1TB SSD, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM, 17.3" LCD 1920x1080 w/ Nvidia GeForce MX350 (2GB DDR5), HP TrueVision 720p HD camera, ports (1 USB-C, 2 USB-A, 1 HDMI, 1 headphone/microphone), Realtek WiFi Certified6, Bluetooth 5.2.
Jan, 2023: M bought a MacBook Air (A1466 Early 2015: 32.5x22.7x1.7cm, 3lbs, 45W, 54Wh Li-polymer battery) Intel i5 1.6Ghz (ToruboBoost up to 2.7GHz), 13.3" LCD (1440x900), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1466 OSX 11.1 (made in 2015) for $450. Upgraded to OSX 12.7.8 (Monterrey).
TO BE CONTINUED