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I'm not exactly sure what the point of this page is. I recently upgraded to a new computer (again) and realized, in a fit of nostalgia, how much old crappy hardware I had around and I wanted to catalog it. I guess this will also be a history of my involvement with computers, starting from the beginning. I get the added bonus of being able to point people here if they think I am insufficiently geeky or hardcore.

Year	Computer	Details
1982?	TRS-80	We only had this for a little while. It was on loan to my Mom while she took some programming course. I think for a while my parents thought that was a mistake since it got me into computers. I guess the Porsche resolved that once and for all.
1983?	Timex Sinclair 1000	Including a "tape storage device" (read: tape recorder) and the 16k memory expansion pack. I loved the video chip, which had "slow mode" and "fast mode." The only problem was that the screen blinked for every single character update in fast mode. I think it was hooked up to an old black and white TV. The only game it could run was Chess.
1984?	Atari 800XL	Now before you say anything, this was not one of the cheapo Atari computers with the keyboard panel, this had a real keyboard. It not only supported BASIC but also Atari game cartridges and came with a Panasonic KXP-1091 printer and a floppy drive! Wow! Subsequent upgrades included a color monitor, then joysticks and game paddles (for programming games, of course). What more could you want? Ah yes, a hard drive...
1987?	4.77/8 Mhz 8088	My first real computer, a classic XT-compatible. It actually had a hard drive of a whopping 20 MB, an insane 640k of memory, and of course the omnipresent Hercules compatible monographics card with the tiny little amber monochrome monitor. It did run Windows 1.01. Fortunately I figured out quickly how to lock it in "turbo mode." Eventually it was upgraded with a blistering 1200 baud modem and a second(!) 20 MB hard drive, as well as, drum roll please, a mouse. I think it went to a couple cousins when we got rid of it.
1991	MITC 25 Mhz 80386	The computer I took away to college, with a whopping 130 MB hard drive and something like 8 MB of memory. It was the top of the line when I got it. In case you are wondering, MITC was a local computer place (probably no longer in business). The name stood for "made in Taiwan computers." It did have a color monitor, and a Super VGA card. It ran Sopwith, TankWar and Visual Basic 1.0 like nobody's business. This one was upgraded with a second 130 MB hard drive, a Sound Blaster Pro (which had a MIDI port and an onboard synthesizer and began my obsession with electronic music), and a 2400 baud MNP-5 modem, the better to log into the college network and this thing called the Internet.
1993	Micron 66 Mhz 80486	Some ditzy girl at college decided she needed a laptop and was selling this (including CD-ROM) at a cut-rate price. I am not making this up. It played Doom a lot better than the 386 (maybe it was the 32 MB of memory). Wait, no, I mean, Maple took much less time to solve calculus problems. Wait, uh... never mind. The old 386 went to my parents. This one got a prized 9600 baud modem, an HP inkjet printer, a Gravis Ultrasound, a Sony CD-ROM that could read digital data, a Sound Blaster AWE32, and a 10 Mbps ethernet card as upgrades. The AWE32 even had its own upgrades, to 2 MB of memory. As for the ethernet card, I was lucky enough to live in a dorm that had ethernet straight to the Internet. In 1994.
1996	Frankenstein 90 Mhz Pentium	Take one Micron computer. Replace 486 motherboard with Pentium motherboard holding 64 MB of RAM. Add one cork (yes, a cork) keeping the motherboard far enough from the frame to not short out. Technically this is not a new computer, but if you replace the brains... good enough. I think it also got a new video card (Diamond Stealth 64), a USRobotics 28.8kpbs modem, a 250MB tape backup, an ISA SCSI card and a couple of ZIP drives, a 2GB hard drive, and a Philips CDD2000 CDR drive, as well as an additional 24 MB of memory. I think I first connected my Sharp Zaurus to this one.
1998	Kehtron 400 Mhz Pentium II	The cream of the crop in 1998, with a mammoth 8 GB of hard drive space, 64 MB of memory, a 2X Creative Labs DVD player and decoder card AND a 4x CD-ROM, a Sound Blaster 64 PCI, and an ATI 3D Rage Pro video card. I even have a naked picture of it. This one got a lot of upgrades. Let's see... 4(!) video cards: a Matrox Millenium/Daimond Monster 3D combo, a 3Dfx Voodoo3, and a 3Dfx Voodoo5 (yes I was unlucky enough to buy one). 3 new sound cards - a DAL Digital Only CardD, a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, and an M-Audio Audiophile 2496. Somewhere along the way it picked up first a BTC 24x CD-ROM and then a Sony 8x/4x/32x CDR/RW drive, an HP color inkjet printer and then an EPSON Stylus 740 color printer, a V.90 56k external modem, a Ditto 4GB tape drive, a Microsoft natural keyboard pro, a Microsoft Intellimouse explorer (the one with the laser), and a PCI Adaptec SCSI card for the Syquest SyJet 1.5 GB drive and the UMAX scanner. Plus a NetGear fast ethernet card. It also got an extra 64 MB of memory. Indirectly it benefited from a Linksys KVM switch, a 3COM ethernet hub, and a Netgear internet router. It's also the computer to which I connected my Everex Freestyle palmtop. It's gone through a lot and still going, but the battery is almost dead and it blue screens quite a bit. It is almost ready for that big used computer shop in the sky.
2001	1.8 Ghz Pentium IV	Buy one bare-bones Pentium IV with 256 MB of RAM. Add 80 GB hard drive, Sony CDR/RW drive, GeForce 3 video accelerator, M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card. Be happy.
2003	???	I know one thing, it will be damn awful fast.