Re: For the fun of it

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

Well, I'm getting in on this game late. That's just like me.

First off, I'm turning 36 in a few days.

The first computer "I" owned was an Apple //e with 128k, a duodisk
drive, Monitor // green screen, a Novation Apple Cat, a Super Serial
Card, and an Imagewriter (1). Actually, my grandparents bought it for
the family for $2400 in 1983 or 1984, and it was shared between all the
family members. I was 13 or 14, and I still vividly remember opening
all the boxes and putting it all together myself. That computer was
used almost every day until 1994 when my father died. It currently sits
in my mom's attic under a cover. I periodically fire it up, and it
works fine.

I went to college in 1988, so I bought a used Apple //e that was a lot
like the family computer. It was a 128k Apple //e with a duodisk and
Monitor //, along with an Epson APL card and an Epson MX80/FT with
Graftrax, and I bought it for $800 with summer-job money. Immediately
added to it was a Super Serial Card and a 1200 baud modem, and off I
went to UCSD, where I amazingly got a part-time job at Beagle Bros
doing tech support. Needless to say, this *really* added to my software
and hardware collection.

This Apple //e is still working like a champ on my desk. It has a
Buffered Grapler, a Super Serial, a Transwarp, a mouse card, a pair of
Unidisk 3.5's, the afore-mentioned DuoDisk, and a 1-meg RamFactor,
along with a No-Slot-Clock and the enhancement chips.  For a while, I
used a home-built external keyboard with numeric keypad, but now the
keyboard is back to normal.

I recently built a Super GS, since it seemed like the nice old parts
and the new custom parts were going to get harder (or impossible) to
get in the future. It is a Rom3 with a SuperDrive controller and 2 HD
floppies, a ZipGSX 8MHz/32kb, Uthernet, Ram-4-GS, and CFFA with a 1GB
CF card, along with 2 800k 3.5 drive and a pair of 5.25" floppies. I
don't have much 16-bit experience, so I am learning it all as if a
beginner. Lots of fun. Almost all of the parts from this machine were
ebay-ed over 2 years, so it was actually still pretty cheap. I can't
believe how much money I could make selling this stuff right now, if I
wanted.

And just to be thorough, my home office/lab has the following *working*
computers: the two Apple //s, a Blue & White Macintosh, a tricked out
Pentium 4, a PIII web/mail/print/NAS server, a PIII test machine, and
my wife's P4. I have a few working notebooks that I cycle through too:
a P4, two PIII's, and a PII. The storage unit has a spare //e, 6 spare
GS'es, a Mac IIfx, a Mac Quadra 650 and a lot of monitors.

My wife is very understanding...

-Warr