I’m not only a freelance writer, I’m also a freelance web designer and a software creator. I’ve also worn the hat of computer systems analyst as well as computer builder.
I tell you that so you can understand why I was thinking so heavily about my history with computers from the late 1980’s on to today. The first computer in my house was from Colecovision. I played a few games on it, I was just a kid after all. But I quickly grew bored with it and moved back to my Atari.
Zenith Data Systems Computer
The next computer in the house was the Apple Macintosh. Again, I quickly grew bored with it though my father and brother loved the thing. Several years went by and I started college and suddenly I needed a computer for writing papers. A word processor would make the task so much easier. My father bought me a Zenith Data Systems PC. It was HUGE and had a gigantic CRT monitor in amber. That computer booted up by inserting one of those 5 inch floppies into the hard drive. Then after it was booted you could swap the floppy for another one to change programs. It had no hard drive. I played about 6 games on it, including McMurphys Mansion and Sleuth. Mansion is a text game and Sleuth looks like something a 3rd grader with Dyslexia would create. Mostly I wrote papers with the original version of Word Perfect. The computer really wasn’t worth much more than that.
A few years later, in 1992, Acer computers came out with the Acer PAC 250 desktop. This thing was billed as the last computer you would ever need and had a huge hard drive; 450MB. Seriously, who could ever use that much space? It also had a CD-ROM drive and included the first in what would become the extremely popular Encarta Encyclopedia. It also included free trials to: America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve and the Imagination Network. More on those tomorrow.
By the end of 1994 I had moved on to a bigger and better computer made by Wolf Systems. It was then that I started building and creating my own computers. Since 1994 I’ve lost count of how many computers I’ve had but it has been a lot. Roughly one every 2-3 years and sometimes I’ll get 2 in one year for different purposes.
There is really no point to this, I was just thinking about the evolution of the technology. It is kind of funny that I haven’t seen a computer in at least 15 years that claims it’s the last computer you will ever need. I think they have all finally figured out that unless we die, we are eventually going to need more space and more speed.
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Freelance Writing Adventures 
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