Timeline, Tales, and pictures of computer hardware I have owned.

Timex-Sinclair 1000
I bought this at Payless about 3 months before I got the Apple.  It was a Z-80 based computer made to be as inexpensive as possible.  You can see the boom-box on the table acting as the tape drive for loading and saving programs, the B&W TV that I used as a monitor, and the RAM module hanging off the back which I think boosted me to a total of 16K or RAM!

You could actually buy all sorts of modules to plug into this little guy, but in the end you would still have a tiny computer with a membrane keyboard.

Apple ][plus Day One
This is the day I brought it home and set it up.  Actually, it got delivered, but you know what I mean.  You cannot see that Timex-Sinclair around there now!  Note the paddle controllers, which I never found a good use for.  They would act like a joystick, one controlling the X axis, the other the Y axis, like you could play a game like that.  

The key thing is the two floppy drives!  That was almost unheard of luxury in 1983!  Also the ubiquitous Apple /// monitor.  My was B&W, but they also came in green and amber screens.  This machine also had 64K of RAM!  Top of the line!  All driven by a 1Mhz 6502 8-bit processor.

Apple ][plus
Here is the same computer, in the same location, but about 9 months down the line.  I put the floppy drives together in the traditional formation, bought a real joystick (A CH Products model that was incredibly flimsy by today's standards), a monitor stand to set the monitor back away from me, and the fan/power switch combo on the left side, since the Apple ][ power supple could put out some serious heat over time and cause parts on the motherboard to fail.

Of course, there is a game on screen here.  Wizardry, one of the hits on the Apple ][ computer line.  It was written in Pascal and you had to run one side of a floppy to install the Pascal interpreter before you could flip the floppy over and actually run the game.

Apple //e
About a year later I managed to trade the ][plus in for a //e model.  The //e included a real keyboard (the plus had a teletype keyboard, which was cheap for Apple to use initially, but didn't have all the keys you would expect to find) and an extended 80 column card which included an extra 64K of RAM.  They were out of stock on the regular 80 column card, so I had to buy the extended even though I had no idea what I would do with 128K of RAM!

My First Mac - The Mac SE
1987 arrives, and with it a Mac SE. Times change, and here we have a computer with a 8Mhz 16-bit 68000 processor with a whole 1 Meg of RAM.   There is that card table again, though it is out in the family room for some reason.  I eventually traded in the card table for the 6 foot folding table I currently use.

And you don't see the Apple //e that the Mac replaced!  I actually sold it to a guy who ran his business on Apple //'s.  Imagine that.  Not only that, I sold it for enough to buy the Mac SE! (At least through a friend on the Apple developer program, which made it $1600 as opposed to $3500 at the time!)

I upgraded this machine over time.  It initially came with just two 800K floppy drives, but right away I ordered a Jasmine 70Meg external hard drive for it.  The came RAM.  I think I paid $250 a megabyte for RAM back then, which meant I spent a lot of money going from 1 to 4 Megs!  Later I installed a Radius 16MHz 68020 accelerator board.  Finally, I acquired an SE/30 motherboard, which could hold a lot more RAM and had a 16MHz 68030 32-bit processor.

I still have the keyboard and mouse in this picture.  I think Nick Chinn has the Mac SE still, with the SE/30 motherboard in it.

The Mac Plus
After I had a Mac SE for several years, I decided I wanted to start a Mac BBS.  At that time Apple was getting rid of its inventory of Mac Plus machines, so I picked up one for a reasonable price.  I upgraded the RAM and let in run the Sound Mind BBS for a year, from August 1990 to late 1991.  When I picked up my next Mac, the IIsi listed below, I sold the Plus to somebody on my BBS for cheap then moved the BBS to the Mac SE.

The Mac IIci
Here was a very nice machine.  Maybe the best Mac ever made.  I got a pieced together model from my friend Larry Woodard mid 1992.  I didn't ask him where he got the pieces (Mac motherboards were hard to get your hands on back then) but the price was right.  I used this machine for a couple of years.  It had a 25MHz 68030 that seemed much faster than the 20MHz unit in the IIsi.  It had three NuBus slots and a processor direct slot which I eventually plugged a 33MHz 68040 processor card into.  At all times this Mac ran like a champ.  It became the last machine to run the Sound Mind BBS.  It drove 4 28.8Kbps modems, 3 hard drives, and 2 CD ROM drives 24 hours a day for well over a year without a hiccup.  When I closed down the BBS in 1995, I sold this Mac to Emil Gallant.

The Quadra 800
Early 1994, my first tower machine!  I got the Quadra 800 at ComputerWare in Palo Alto, where my girlfriend at the time worked.  Another slick package, the main problem with the Quadra 800 was the incredible pain it was to install RAM in it.  Other than that it was a very nice computer, and very fast with its 33MHz 68040 processor.  I kept it for about 2 years before buying my next Mac, at which time I sold it to Anthony Chiono at Global Village.

The PowerMac 8500
This is essentially a 120MHz PowerPC 604 in the same case as the Quadra 800.  I got this machine at ComputerWare in Sunnyvale in early 1996.  It carried the same drawback, installing RAM was a royal pain, but it was a nice machine and it would run 68000 based code through its emulator faster than any 68040 machine could run it native.  And with native PowerPC code it screamed.  I still have this machine today, although it has a 250MHz PowerPC G3 card in it from Newer Technology.

The PowerBook 190cs
The only laptop I have ever owned.  The PowerBook 190cs was on deep discount, $1400, in late 1996 when I picked it up.  It was a very handy machine for a while, with a combo PC card that had a 28.8 modem and a 10base-T Ethernet connection.  I still have this machine today, though the system software is corrupted somehow, so I can no longer use the network card.  Without that, it is just another place I can play some old Mac games.  This was the last 68000 machine built by Apple. 

The NEC PC
My first Windows box. In 1996 when I was at Big Island, we were working on Mac and PC software, so I wanted to get a PC at home to play with.  This was an unremarkable unit, though you could say that about most PCs I guess, with 166MHz Pentium processor and 64 Megs of RAM.  I only kept it for a year, after which I sold it to Andrea DeMaio.

The Dell XPS-R400
My next Windows box, and a much better unit altogether.  After working at Big Island and Aveo, I managed to develop some opinions over how I should spend my money when it came to buying PCs.  I no longer hand the time and patience to do anything like building a machine from scratch, but I noticed over my time at both companies that all the Dell machines we had were almost problem free, which units from Compaq, Gateway, Micron, and Packard-Bell were all less reliable.  So I put my money down on a 400MHz Pentium II machine from Dell.  This was a good machine.  After I upgraded the video card, it was great.  My wife still uses this machine today.

The Dell Dimension 4100
This is my current machine, running at 933MHz.  It seems to be as reliable as my last Dell, with a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-R drive in it.  Because USB has finally started to fulfill its promise, I actually share a keyboard, a trackball, a monitor, and a 250MB USB Zip drive between the Dell and my PowerMac 8500 (which I installed a USB card in) via an IOGear keyboard/mouse/video USB switchbox.  Very cool indeed.

500MHz Indigo iMac
Show here on our kitchen table with our daughter Madeleine at the helm.  I picked this up from a co-worker for a very reasonable price.  With 512MB of RAM and an AirPort card in it, it is a very nice little machine that just needs a power plug to be on the internet in our house.  It is now running OS X so I can take advantage of all the fun iLife software.  The addition of this machine to our household means that I should retire that PowerMac 8500.