I have had an interest in using older computing hardware since I was a kid. My dad was in the computer industry, so there were always parts laying around and machines being handed down. This also meant I had siblings who were exploring and learning and were occasionally willing to help me learn.

Systems I used:

• TI 99/4a - hand-me-down family computer [games]
• Leading Edge PC/AT compatible, based on the Intel 8088 (I think) - family computer, had LEWP (Leading Edge Word Processor) [games, word processing]
• 80486 DX66 - sibling's computer, all shiny new things because Sibling Had Job, ran OS/2 [games
• Super Nintendo Entertainment System - sibling's treasure
• Nintendo Entertainment System - gift from family friend when outdated [games]
• TI-81 - parent's calculator from university days [programming, math]
• TI-82 - loaner from high school physics class [programming, music, math]
• TI-83 - high school higher math acquisition [programming, math]

One of my siblings tried to teach me QBasic, but the concept and notation of types escaped me entirely. I started programming on my TI-81, but I feel like I really started to do interesting stuff on the TI-83. This paralleled my mathematical development, since a lot of what I did was to draw fractals or help with my math homework. I really started understanding and doing interesting things with programming during my first programming class during college, but the seeds were planted on these little machines. This is also the root of my interest in fractals: I considered using Fractint on my sibling's 486 to be a fun game. (Funny enough, I never learned to use the TI-89 for anything more than symbolic algebra and calculus, so I don't really count it.)

At some point I got my own chassis and scraped together a machine from spare parts. I remember that hard disks were pretty much always the hardest part to come by.

• Pentium II-based machine - hand-me-down from teacher at school, My First Computer [everything]
• Pentium I-based system with F00F bug - BSD coax-to-twisted-pair ethernet bridge [sysadmin]
• 80486 serial terminal server, 128MB of RAM, SCSI-2 - scrap from sibling's workplace [script kiddie, sysadmin, kernel builds, building other people's code, DIP switch config, RAID]

My history with these machines fed an interest in emulating some of the systems, especially the SNES and the TI-8x ones. This coincided with the Windows 95-98 era and my acquisition of a CD-RW drive and the beginning of my digital packrat habits. Since authoring this page, in turn, coincides with more general interest in retrocomputing, I'm working on providing some of that archived *stuff* here.

N.B. I will not provide ROMs. Software from extant publishers or available elsewhere (think GoG.com and similar) probably won't show up here. I'll remove anything I list here if I'm properly asked to.

• Nothing here yet.