My computer and its three forefathers were all named Silent Bob after Kevin Smith's character. Bob is reserved for something else that hopefully won't be so silent.
I've built every PC I've owned. I think people who buy prebuilt PCs don't deserve to own them. (Read that carefully and you'll realize it's not as condescending as it sounds--you don't deserve the heartache of trying to use MicroSoft operating systems if you're not interested in computers enough to build your own).
My first computer was an Atari. I programmed on it on a carpeted floor doing hunt and peck so slowly that by the time I finished a short program it had overheated. Later I figured out to set the Atari on a board to keep it from overheating and I now hunt and peck at 70wpm.
I also owned a Commodore 64, a TI 99 4/A, a Coleco Adam, an Apple //e, a Laseractive (Apple //c clone), a Mac SE and a Mac LC before finally falling victim to WIntel's market domination.
My first PC was a DX2/66. It was, in fact, the very best machine you could buy to play Doom on at the time. Doom was the primary motivation for my buying a PC.
I only ever got called to the principle's office once in high school. Of all the mischief I'd never been caught doing, you can't imagine the anxiety I was in as a walked gloomily down the hallway. Apparently I'd become known as "the computer expert" at my high school and theirs wouldn't print. I told them to reboot. I never did get caught for anything in high school.
I was volunteered for and sent to a computer math competition in high school. Of all the schools competing, I was the only student who arrived with long hair, ripped blue jeans and a metal band t-shirt. I was the only one from my school to get any of the programs correct.
During the 80s I frequented most of Dallas-Ft. Worth's BBSs. I hacked several of them and obtained user lists with passwords. After doing so, many made me a cosysop (think co-administrator) without my ever asking or making any threats. I simply wanred them of their security holes--after saving a copy of the userlist, of course.
When I first connected online I was at 300 baud. At the time, CompuServe gave you a discount if you connected at 110 baud instead. I could already hunt and peck faster than 300 baud. The first time I saw 1200 baud my jaw nearly dropped to see text moving on the screen so quickly. When everyone finally got 2400 baud, my somewhat wealthy friend took a road job and left me his US Robotics Dual Standard HST. When you connected in HST mode to any BBS, the sysop would usually break into chat with you excited that it was the first time he'd ever seen the light register. He'd then proceed to give you elite access to all of his file sections.
My first hard drive was 10 megabite Apple Sider (it's a pun--get it? don't even ask about AppleCats and CatFurs). At the time, 10 megs was more than I could ever need. I would incriminate myself enough to be held indefinitely for terrorism suspicion if I described the contents of the text files that filled that hard drive.
The first time I "surfed the web" was using a text-only program called Lynx. It was much better than Gofer. The only hypertext (the HT in HTML) I'd seen at the time was in the form of email. I read it using Elm, which I preferred to Pine. Unix email clients are named after trees. I guess this is because they thought email would save trees.
My first encounter was internet people was in usenet in 1992. Prior to that, I'd frequented FidoNet and before that WWIV-net and C-Net (a Commodore based BBS software not to be confused with the current C-Net web portal), amateur networks that connected BBSs around the country. In 1992, most people on usenet knew what they were talking about. By 1994, most of these people stopped reading usenet altogether.
My first experiences on IRC (internet relay chat) were in 1993. Most everyone was on efnet at the time, and it was stable.
I guess I would qualify as a pro-sumer. I do pretty menial programming for a living these days, a thankful substitute for unemployment that many people like me are enjoying these days.
