Computers

IBM PC 5150 (1983, IBM Store, Oakland)
Intel 8088, 4.77 KHz. Hardcard 10mb internal hard disk. Silver Reed daisy wheel printer, then Toshiba dot matrix. I fondly remember installing individual memory chips by hand. Those were the 5.25″ floppy disk days. I ran Microsoft Word 1.0 and this was back when Word came packaged with a mouse (seen here in the bottom right, it was mechanical with a steel ball) because few PC users had mice then (it plugged into an expansion board that plugged into the motherboard). Got a programming job writing database applications on dBASE II/III back when personal computers were just barely starting to show up in corporate offices. Later it served for many years as a nostalgic printer stand. I still have it and fire it up once in a long while for old time’s sake.

486SX system (1992, Fry’s)
Intel 486SX. Got sucked in by this marketing gimmick but it ran well and got me onto the Internet back in the dial-up days. First Windows (3.1) setup.

486DX system (1995, PC Ten, Oakland)
Intel 486DX, 300 KHz. First CD ROM drive. Wrote my doctoral dissertation on this. HP LaserJet printer.

Dell Inspiron 3000 (2000, eBay)
Pentium 200mHz. My first laptop, used it for my first PowerPoint presentations.

AMD Duron system (2002, built with parts from Newegg)
AMD Duron 1.2 MHz. Ran Win98 very late into the 2000s!

ASUS S5NE laptop (2004, Newegg)
Pentium M, 1MHz. A really beautiful laptop I had great affection for, second only to my original IBM PC.

Dell Vostro 200 Mini (2008, Dell Outlet)
Pentium Core Duo, 2.2 GHz. I actually still have this because it has a nice dual-optical drives setup for duplicating CDs and DVDs.

ASUS BT6130 (2014, B&H Photo, refurb)
Intel Core i3-3220, 3.3 GHz. Ran Windows 7 then 10, my current desktop. Started using a stand-up setup in July, 2018.

Late 2020, built my first fanless system from the Asus motherboard, swapping for a WD Blue SSD, No-Fan CPU cooler, and Seasonic fanless power supply, all in an open chassis. I LOVE THE SILENCE–WHY DIDN’T I DO THIS YEARS AGO!?! Oh yes, also swapped in an Intel Core i7-3770T.

Lenovo Yoga 3.11 (2015, BestBuy)
Intel Core M. Trying to keep this one usable til I can justify getting a Dell XPS or such.

Dell Precision 3551 (2021, State of California)
Intel Core i7 10850H, 2.70Ghz. My “work” laptop for the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. We got high-end units thinking we would need them for running high-end mapping software, but almost none of us used it for that (we contracted with professional mappers). So these ended up being rather big & heavy overkill. Had one motherboard replaced under warrantyafter it kept overheating (tech guy came to my house, during the pandemic!), then a battery failure.

Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook-13ITL6 (2021)
Intel Core i3-1115G4, 3.00Ghz. A fantastic workhorse with exceptional charging speed and battery life, this is what I take when travelling.