My first constant experience with the world of Programming was on a Commodore 64.  Those were the type of personal computers that used tapes and floppies and could plug into your tv set.  Nifty stuff for those days!  To run a programme, you had to type in a whole string of characters specifying what kind of device you were running, how you wanted the programme to start, etc.

Next was the monochrome XTs or ATs or technically known as 80186 ( speaking under correction).  The great thing about these PCs was that you had a turbo button for speeding up the computer.  On some games you could slow things down a bit and on some games you had to use it to get a usefull speed.

An awesome moment in my history of computers was the arrival of our nuclear family unit's own PC in the form of a 486DX2 with a maths co-processer.  My father was an architect's assistant and needed the best computing power available.  Enter Windows 3.1.  This OS was AWESOME if you were used to DOS.

Windows 3.1 made way for Windows 95, 98, NT and then XP.  My current configuration is a humble Intel Celeron 530 laptop with 1GB DDR2 RAM running a 1.73GHZ with 1MB L2 Cache.  I specifcally asked for a laptop with XP over Vista as the requirements for Vista would not be within the range for my stolen laptops repayment.  Working with Vista at work, I have come to realize that Windows 7 is the Vista that Microsoft wanted all along.

In between the C64 was the programming part of my history with computers that started with BASIC, moved on to Pascal, C++, Assembler, Delphi, PHP and then finally asp.net with C#.  Programming has been a mindshifting experience for me, clearing all forms of thought.

Long live the computer!