Richard Cosgrove at 2013-01-24 19:17:02:

Generally when I speak to my 17in MacBook Pro, I'm swearing at it, because I'm carrying it in my backpack and the damn thing weighs a tonne. So I've recently bought an 11-year old PowerBook, which I'm more than happy with. It's powerful enough to run Final Draft and Scrivener, and I boosted it with a new, much bigger hard drive, more memory and a new wifi network card, to make it more useful in today's world. It's kinda fugly cute when it's sat next to my shiny MPB.

brianb18 at 2013-01-24 19:27:21:

My first pc was a 486 Packard Bell. What a piece of shit. It was always breaking and needing to know how to fix it is what inevitably got me working in IT, first back to school and now 10 years later... To replace my current older Toshiba laptop I really wanted a MacBook Pro with retina display, but I couldn't justify (ahem, afford) the cost so I installed a much faster SSD hard drive ($80) and upgraded to Windows 8 (you can still get it for $40) and added 2GB RAM ($20) for 4 total. Now its like having a brand new computer for minimal cost since I use all external peripherals (wireless kb/mouse and widescreen monitor) anyway. Plus I kept my original hard drive and put that into an external usb enclosure for extra/backup storage. Sweet! And in case anyone is wondering, my apps including Scrivener and Celtx run great on Windows 8. Have not had any bluescreens or hardware/software issues and am very happy so far. As far as writing, I do all my production work on my Toshi, but still enjoy putting my thoughts down with pen to paper in my moleskine journal as well. Anyone remember cursive?

Richard Cosgrove at 2013-01-24 19:28:03:

I miss my old MPBs though. One got stolen, and I killed my next one when I knocked a pint glass full of water over it. Prior to that I used PCs. Once I saved all my writing on floppy discs - a separate disc for each project. Then I got a PC with a decent hard drive and stored everything on the hard drive. Everything I had worked on until that point took up just one CD. But I really miss my old PC. Had it for years, but over a few months I had to replace and upgrade everything about it, except its keyboard and mouse. At that point it stopped feeling like "my old friend" and just became a monolith made of expensive plastic and metal, containing a stressful OS. That was when I switched over to MacBooks. The things I really get attached to are keyboards. I used the same USB keyboard for nearly 15 years – until the aforementioned incident with a glass of water wrecked it. Other people struggled with it because I had worn off most of the ink on the letters. The space bar even had grooves in it from my thumbnail striking it. No other keyboard feels right compared to that one, but after the water spillage, the keys no worked, so it had to go. it's almost the same with mice. When I'm temping in an office, I take my old Apple Mighty Mouse with me. I just can't use other mice. But it could just be my OCD kicking in.

plinytheelder_t at 2013-01-24 23:06:41:

Oh you kids... but they say you always remember your first. DecSystem 10 (KI10 processor board), 36 bit architecture with bytes that vary in size from 1 to 36 bits, wire core memory and an editor called Teco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECsystem-10 Anachronistic? Sure, but it was beautiful, elegant, substantial and no-one will ever make a machine like that ever again. The Casablanca, if you will, of computer systems. 1st PC?? Commodore Amiga, after college.

John Arends at 2013-01-25 09:42:17:

It's still in my closest, it still powers up, but alas the dot matrix printer -- that made everything on it real, that gave the green dot letters on the beer label sized screen life as ink on paper -- died in a dumpster long ago... My Kaypro 64 still owns my virginity. It was among the first computers you could pack up and carry to the library and get lost back in the stacks with...to this day, I can still hear its signature purr and whine as everything spun up to speed. No sweeter music back then...