Headquarters (Part 1)

Here begins my catalog of all the computer setups I’ve had to date (hopefully more visually appealing than this overview I wrote in 2017). Today’s installment: childhood and teens.

Years: 1983-1987
Machines: TI-99/4A
What I was doing: playing cartridge games like Parsec and Munch Man; writing BASIC programs that could test your knowledge of addition and print ASCII art.

Years: 1988-1995
Machines: Three successive Tandy computers: 1000 TL/2 (the only picture I could find from this time), a 386, and a 486
What I was doing: Writing small QuickBasic, C, and Pascal programs; memorizing powers of 2 and digits of Pi; playing Battle Chess and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

Years: 1996-1997
Machines: Custom-built Pentium 2 bought from a computer-fest convention type thing
What I was doing: Discovering online stuff like a local BBS and then the Internet; learning how to assemble computers from parts (shoutout to NewEgg); optimizing my AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files so I could play Doom.

(Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures I could find of my college dorm room setups but they were suitably epic, especially junior year which had 3 full workstations and a console game station)

Years: 1998-2000
Machines: Whatever Cedarville supplied (but it was cool that they supplied desktop PCs!); a home-cooked box I cobbled together with parts scrounged from my job at The Hackery.
What I was doing: Breezing through college programming classes in C++, Java, and VisualBasic; optimizing programs that generate interesting integer sequences; playing Diablo and Age of Empires II.