The Macintosh Classic. This was my mom's computer. In the early 90's, I remember her lugging it down to the living room, and setting it up on the carpeted floor, laying down and typing away at some freelance writing work she was doing. I loved this computer because of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and mouse. It's small size and tidy form factor also made it appealing to me.

The Leading Edge. This was an IBM clone made by a company called "Leading Edge." I remember study the triangular logo on the machine quite a bit. This MS-DOS PC was equipped with a 5.25" floppy drive. My favorite thing to do was pop in the floppy disk for Big Bird's Special Delivery and have my dad help me get it started on the DOS prompt. There was also a dot matrix printer connected to it. Oh did I love to hear it print. I would ask my parents and they would feed me a sheet of blank paper so I could draw on it. I of course spent much time tearing off and folding up the perforated feeding strips on the edge.

One fine day in 4th grade, my little school was having a junk cleanout day and allowed the students to take some of the dumpster stuff home. I spied a complete IBM PC XT with color monitor. In the late 90s this machine was in that gray area between completely obsolete and vintage, so no one else wanted it. I was thrilled to bring this extremely heavy machine home and have my very own computer. For a short time I enjoyed exploring everything on the MS-DOS operating system. My favorite was a game called Centipede. One fateful day, I was deleting files to free up space, and not realizing what I was doing, deleted some critical system files the broke the OS. I was never able to get it running again.

©1995 J.C.T. Wellman