I bought a new computer this week. (hold for applause) For a guy like me, that equates to a 6-year-old waking for Christmas morning.

I have been using computers all my life. I learned to write Basic programming language in elementary school. Basic is old school, and well … basic. But I remember amazing my teachers with Basic programs I wrote that played like actual games and told jokes – one was a driving game where the road was made of wavy asterisks and you had to dodge rocks also made of keyboard characters. Another, was an ASCII picture of then president Ronald Reagan and you could ask him a question and it would result in a joke with a “Well” in it.

I never had the Commodore 64, but spent lots of time on various friends’ systems. I still remember my dad and I going to buy the first computer to call my very own – an Apple IIe purchased used from a newspaper classified ad. Years later I became friends with the seller – thanks again Brit!

That computer served me well the rest of my years at home. Funny how content you can be with green type on a black screen. I recall upgrading the RAM to 1MB!! (That was a lot back then – by the way my new machine has 8GB of RAM, so it has 8,192 times as much memory! Lets not even talk about hard drive space or internet speeds.)

I have had many computers since then, I even hand-built several machines – which adds a sense of accomplishment to the already exciting time of a getting a new computer!

My garage at times looks like a computer graveyard with the old cases, hard drives and random computer parts. In fact, I let a friend raid my computer leftovers once and he found enough parts to piece together a whole system.

And today, as many of you know, I spend most my waking hours seated at a computer in my office or on one of my laptops I have stashed strategically around the house – its a good thing I love them so.