I cut my programming teeth on a Radio Shack TRS-80, with a cassette player attached to it to save the running bunny program we were supposed to write to pass the first exam.

The very first computer I owned did not have a hard drive, but ran on two 5,25inch floppy disks, which when discarded made very good solar eclipse viewers. I played Prince of Persia from a floppy disk till the wee hours of the morning and ran Wordstar 2 on a second floppy drive with the DOS bootdisk in the first. The brands Verbatim and Maxell were preferred, even when the disks shrank to 3.5 inches.

When I finally got my first hard disk it was a whopping 120MB. Yey! Now I could run Windows 3.1 and save my files in folders. I learned how to use a mouse. The floppy had shrunk to 3.5 inches by this time, black with color coded labels. In a few more months Windows 95 came out with the floppy installers. I was in heaven.

But it wasn’t until I got my first taste of the Internet that I realized this was what I wanted to be involved in for the rest of my life.