(WARNING: this entire blog entry is a total nerd zone.)
Welcome, friend! Yes, my new work computer has arrived, and being the geek that I am I'm actually excited about it. My old computer served me well, but it's a bit long in the tooth (1ghz Pentium 3, 256MB RAM) and since I need graphics software it made sense to get a new one. I’m very happy with it, though I admit I would prefer a Mac. My computer at home is an iMac, and it is also getting up there in age, though I must say it has served me very well for the past five plus years. It is actually the first Mac I’ve ever owned, and it definitely has made me an Apple kind of guy. The first computer I ever used was an Apple ][e in Junior High School – I was lucky enough to be one of the very few kids who had access to it, and I remember drawing pictures in Logo and writing simple programs in BASIC. I caught the computer bug (a virus, perhaps?) right away and started begging my parents for a computer. They came up big (thanks Mom & Dad) that Christmas with a TRS-80 Color Computer. I spent a lot of time programming my Coco, as it was affectionately known to those who used them. I wrote games, graphic demos and even a simple GUI. The Coco had its flaws – it didn’t have the graphic capabilities of a TI99/4A or a Atari 800, or the games of a C64, and it couldn’t display lower case letters. But it had advantages as well – it had the best processor of all of the 8-bit computers (Motorola 6809E), and the best version of BASIC, which was made by a then little-known company named Microsoft. Tony Kulla