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.

When that laptop failed in 2013, it was replaced with an HP Pavillion. It's AMD A6 Quad Core processor is suppported by 8GB RAM and a 500 GB hard drive.