My first computer was an Apple IIe, when I was in Jr. High. From there I learned BASIC, and 6502 Assembler. I built my own II+ from a bare motherboard, and salvaged parts. This experience got me my first job working for Contra Costa County, making programming changes to a parts inventory program for the radio shop. Then I started working at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, where one of my coworkers introduced me to the IBM PC. When you ran the "dir" command and it said 360,000 bytes free, I had to play more with it. That was too cool, to print such a big number. He took me to my first "computer show" at the fairgrounds. We bought all the parts, motherboard, case, power supply, memory, video card... and dual floppies! Of course, I can't do anything normal, so these floppies were 5 1/4" 720K quad density. I rigged up a switch to toggle them into double-step mode for compatibility with standard 360K disks. It also had a middle postition to use the a: as a 360K program disk and B: as a 720K data disk. With the PC, I learned 8086 Assembler, the painful differences between a hercles graphics card and all the IBM supported cards, the C programming language, a brief stint with PASCAL, and the realization that dual floppies are too small!!! By now I am off to college, and got a job at the university fixing PCs. They gave me a UNIX account for email. WoW!!! Everything I hated about DOS, is done right in unix!!!! Thus began my quest to become a unix guru. Today, I still grudgingly use windows when I have to, but unix (in most forms) is my main platform of choice.
My current equipment, more or less.