I was lately in a twitter back-and-forth with some of my vintage computing brethren when the topic of the earliest systems each of us owned came up. My first was a TI-99/4A gifted me (I coached the parents on the purchase carefully beforehand) on Christmas morning, 1982. It was a nice first step, and from there it was off the the Apple //c, Macintosh, Amiga 1000, etc. I have first-hand knowledge of a great many systems given the speed at which I leapt most fickle from one to the other, but my the bulk of my knowledge of the microcomputer revolution came not from first-hand experience but from a small cinderblock room in a private school in southern Virginia.
From 6th grade through high school graduation, I attended Hampton Roads Academy, a private school in Newport News, Virginia. I started in the Fall semester of 1983 and was already a computer geek (long, long before computers were remotely cool). I’d hand in book reports written in TI Writer, printed on my Smith-Corona TP-1 daisywheel printer well before anyone else in the class had seen a word processor, I believe. A burgeoning computer geek, I was. And, given this, I took the opportunity to explore the library for books and magazines on the subject.
In short order, I located the tiny periodicals room, off of the main library, and found several years of Creative Computing magazines to pore through. [Read them for yourself, at the Internet Archive.] On most days, I would spend part of the lunch hour in that room reading about a great number of systems I’d never before heard of. Put together by David H. Ahl, Creative Computing was unique in covering basically every platform out there — and there were many. Way back when, each system was its own ecosystem; it was very different from today’s world of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and basically nothing else. The intricacies of these disparate system fascinated me, which is why I remember salient details of most every computer described within, even to this day over 30 years later.
I read about the ongoing MSX situation, initiated by Spectravideo‘s systems. I was amazed by the Dimension 68000. The industrial design of Wang word processors intrigued me (and HRA had one in their finance office). Kaypro seemed the CP/M system to have. Data General had the most impressive laptop. The Mindset graphics computer was a marvel to behold from a technical and design perspective. Heathkit, Leading Edge, NEC, Sharp, AT&T, Actrix, and GRiD had some particular stand-outs, as well. These details are still with me today.
Adding to the fun of that tiny periodicals room was the fact that one of the first Apple II’s in the school was eventually setup on a desk inside. With that, a somewhat larger crowd grew, but my main focus was still the magazines. (I had a //c at home by then.)
I stumbled upon a discussion of GNU/Linux on the desktop on Reddit recently, with someone predicting that “next year” will be the year of Linux on the desktop (with tongue-in-cheek and as it ever was). This got me thinking about the one time that I ever ran Linux as my primary desktop OS, and I thought I’d write a little about it. 
The original Macintosh, released in early 1984, was a groundbreaking machine built to “put a ding in the universe,” and its creators knew it. To mark the occasion, they pressed 
relaxing with the web on the couch at home. I’m anxious to find out, and doing so should be a rather interesting experience here at the dawn of a new personal digital device category.
Last month I published 
